“Is it the ideal scenario?” she said. “No. But as a mom, I know at least I’m giving them a healthy alternative. The mind-set now isn’t that you have to be the perfect mom, but that you’re doing the best you can.”

Alissa Bushnell, 45, said she keeps a pouch in her bag so she can give it to her 4 ½-year-old daughter during the drive home from school. “I’ve got 20 minutes in the car with a hungry kid,” said Ms. Bushnell, a public relations consultant who lives in a rural town in Northern California and doesn’t have time to prepare an alternative. She equates the pouch to having a back-seat TV in the car: a convenient distraction in harried times.

When Mr. Grimmer and his wife, Tana Johnson, came up with the idea for Plum Organics, they weren’t thinking about any of this. All they wanted was to get their baby girls to eat lunch.

Busy parents, they had put their children in day care by the time they were 6 months old, sending them off each day with a box of home-cooked fruits and grains and vegetables — food that would often return uneaten, without the parents there to sell it. But when they tried puréeing the food, in a precursor to the pouch, the box came back empty.

Mr. Grimmer, a triathlete and former executive at Clif Bar, a maker of energy bars, soon realized he had made a discovery that might appeal to other parents. “I’d argue that even if we weren’t working full time, we’re all moving at the speed of light,” he said. Long work days, beckoning smartphones, hyper-efficiency. “We want to make sure we’re able to move at the right speed, but also do the right thing for our kids.”

The proof seems to be in the pudding. Plum Organics conservatively estimates that its sales of pouches for babies, toddlers and children will be $53 million in 2012, up from around $4,800 when it put out its first pouches in 2008.

Other companies are reporting similar results. Gerber said the sales of its new lines of pouches for babies and toddlers are growing at double-digit rates. And Earth’s Best said its pouch sales are growing at “triple-digit rates” (sales in grocery stores grew 372 percent in the last year, the company reported) and that the popularity of the pouches is one of the major reasons their sales of organic baby food grew 41 percent in the last three months, despite falling birthrates, even as baby food sales in general have remained flat.