Why Every Decent Restaurant Has a Product in the Grocery Store Now

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The fundamental appeal of restaurants was once that they produced flavors you couldn’t find inside your own home. If you wanted what the premier red-sauce joint in America was selling, you would have to find your way to one of eight global cities to finagle a reservation at Carbone. To experience White Castle, you would have to go, in person, to White Castle. And should you have a craving for TGI Fridays’ signature loaded potato skins, there was no choice but to make a pilgrimage to TGI Fridays.

Now restaurants are invading the grocery store. They’ve captured the freezer aisle, colonized the pastas, conquered condiments and spreads. 

Restaurants have been creeping into grocery stores since the middle of the last century, when the beloved Ohio-based restaurant chain Stouffer’s arrived in the freezer aisle. “It’s been a long, slow burn to get to this point,” says Elly Truesdell, founder and managing partner at New Fare, an investment fund specializing in early-stage food and beverage businesses, including Tacombi. White Castle has been selling microwavable sliders in the grocery store since 1987, when, after being turned down by external suppliers, it developed its own manufacturing process in-house. Over the next decade and a half, Taco Bell’s branded taco shells, salsas and sauces hit supermarket aisles, and California Pizza Kitchen brought its barbecue chicken pizzas to the freezer case. This gave the brands not only new revenue streams but also exposure to new customers. 

What’s different today is the sheer number of brands. “I do feel like there are new restaurants or chefs launching food products almost every week,” says Truesdell, who was once a product scout for Whole Foods Market. Restaurants have always been precarious businesses, but Covid-19, and the ensuing shutdowns, illustrated just how fragile they were. “By necessity, a lot of chefs and restaurants were scrambling, and so they started launching products,” she continues, and while some of these moves were short-term pivots, many of those businesses transitioned to become “full consumer brands.” 

There was an age when a restaurant would have to be a corporate giant before venturing into retail. Now, there’s the internet. Restaurants have Instagram accounts; chefs are celebrities. “Ninety percent of the people who followed Dave and Momofuku on socials did not live in cities in which we operated restaurants,” Mariscal says. Introducing a successful consumer packaged-goods brand is notoriously difficult, but the barrier to entry is also lower than ever. It’s easier for smaller brands to communicate directly with manufacturers, many of whom are now willing to take a chance on smaller runs. Meanwhile, specialty shops and online marketplaces allow chefs “a way to do this without immediately launching at Kroger nationwide,” Truesdell says.

Part of the sell to consumers is that restaurants have credibility that big food brands do not; the grocery store is an extension of this already-built world. 

Meanwhile, frozen food is having a moment. If you look at pandemic-era survey —somewhere from 33% (per the US Energy Information Administration) to 55% (per Tyson Foods) of Americans have a second freezer? Home consumers have better setups, too, says Brandon Hoy, co-founder of Roberta’s. “The microwave sucks, right?” he says. “Rarely can you make anything good in a microwave.” But now 60% of households have an air fryer.

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