The launch of chef Daniel Humm’s $7 boxed meal kit line at Target may have surprised the legions of fans and followers who associate him with the luxury of Eleven Madison Park, his three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Manhattan. But Riff, developed in partnership with Mark Ramadan, a kind of grocery superstar thanks to his work building condiment company Sir Kensington’s before its reported $140 million sale to Unilever in 2017, has been years in the making.
The premise, that an ultra-high-end chef would dabble in Target pasta, is jarring. Or, as Grubstreet puts it, “weird.” But Humm is hardly the first to try. (To my left, as I type this newsletter, is my stash of dried Momofuku noodles priced at $11 for four packets, also sold at Target.)
Similar to the restaurant industry, there’s no guarantee of product success, no matter who you are. The CPG (consumer packaged goods) cycle, from idea to hundreds of store shelves across the country, is long and complicated. Still, the market is white-hot, with an increasing number of chefs and restaurants hoping to get in on the action. Why?
I asked Elly Truesdell, an investor and CPG expert who spent almost a decade determining which products showed up on shelves at Whole Foods, to help me understand.
The answer is complex, as Truesdell deftly explained in a recent edition of her newsletter, New Fare. But to start, there’s a market for these new products. “People are sort of obsessed with brands and with grocery,” she told me. (I blame Instagram.)
Lots of other factors — social, economic, the siren song of a major exit to a giant food company — might compel a chef or restaurant to seek fame on shelves. Truesdell talked me through everything that goes into packaged-good success (or failure) for a chef or restaurant, including marketing, packaging, audience development, celebrity, and, ultimately, how to judge if a product will thrive.
This conversation, available to Expedite’s paid subscribers, has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Expedite: As someone who’s seen a lot of consumer products, what’s interesting to you about Riff?
Elly Truesdell, New Fare Partners: “I find this particularly interesting because of Daniel Humm’s profile and background. Being in the industry for a long time — it’s been almost 20 years now — I’ve seen a growing number of chefs entering the grocery world. Ten-plus years ago, it was definitely not like this. There was no cachet to launching a CPG brand, there wasn’t the same sort of luster there is today. So it’s not totally surprising to me that people like Daniel Humm are going after consumer goods.
“On the other hand, it is sort of surprising. There’s some part of me that thinks a lot of the recent culinary ambition that’s going into grocery is largely driven by the exits that they’ve seen — by dollar signs. I’ve talked to dozens and dozens of people and worked with several to help launch their product lines, and a lot of them are very transparent about this. The tricky thing about that is, once people get into CPG they realize very quickly how hard it is.”