Dylan DeNeve of Brooklyn dined on homemade baby food of vegetable purées, delicately seasoned with leeks, red peppers, cumin and thyme, prepared by her mother, Alexandra, a lawyer. In Atlanta, Wes and Hadley Stewart enjoyed homemade mashed-up kale, butternut squash and ancient grains.

“I was a big fan of introducing all sorts of tastes, and my rule was to try new things at least 10 times before I gave up,” said their mother, Morgan, an independent educational consultant. “I was determined to establish good eating habits early, and now the two of them will eat anything.”

Thanks to mothers like these, sales of commercially prepared baby food have been steadily falling since 2005. But the baby food industry is hardly waving a white diaper. Instead, it is competing head-on with mom’s kitchen.

Beech-Nut, one of the oldest names in the business, has just revamped its line of baby food, adding hip ingredients like pomegranate and quinoa. It has redesigned its packaging as well, putting the food in attractive contoured glass jars with clear labels and using a new process that eliminates the ascorbic acid and leaves carrots bright orange and beets red. It is promoting the new line with its largest marketing budget in a decade.