Outsmarting Big Food: How Mason Dixie Wins With Integrity

0:10Hey everyone, I'm Ray Latif and you're tuned into Taste Radio, the leading podcast for entrepreneurs and innovators in the food and beverage industry. In this episode, we're joined by Asha Abolaisia, the founder and CEO of Mason Dixie Foods, a fast-growing brand of frozen comfort food, best known for its clean ingredient biscuits and breakfast sandwiches. If the legacy food giants won't evolve, Mason Dixie will do it for them, one honest skillet-cooked meal at a time. When Asha Abolaisia founded Mason Dixie Foods in 2014, she set out to deliver what real people are truly hungry for, clean, craveable comfort food made without compromise.

0:55No preservatives, no shortcuts, just real ingredients and real flavor. Today, Mason Dixie offers a growing lineup of frozen biscuits, breakfast sandwiches, burritos, and fried chicken sandwiches, all made with fresh ingredients, real dairy, and no artificial ingredients, bleached flour, or seed oils. The products are available in more than 6 ,000 stores across the country, including Whole Foods, Costco, Sprouts, Giant, Harris Teeter, and more. In this episode, Asha shares how she's taking on the legacy CPG heavyweights by building a bold next-gen frozen food brand. She dives into how Mason Dixie harnesses consumer insights, rigorous cost discipline, and category white space to expand far beyond biscuits.

1:45She also breaks down how the brand is reshaping the definition of, quote, natural for modern shoppers, proving it's possible to scale with integrity and lead with purpose without ever compromising on what matters most.

2:01Hey folks, it's Ray with Taste Radio. Right now, I am supremely honored to be sitting down with Asha Abolasha, who is the founder and CEO of Mason Dixie Foods. Asha, so great to see you. Great to see you, Ray. Thanks so much for flying up to our humble city of Boston. We are at BevNet HQ in Newton, Massachusetts, and we were chatting about our respective cities, yours being Baltimore and the thriving CPG scene that is happening out there, which I admit, you know, I haven't been out to Baltimore in a while since Expo East moved to Philadelphia. Now, obviously, it's completely gone, but I'm so happy to hear that things are going well.

2:37Oh yeah. It's an incredible time. And I think it's, it's interesting to see, you know, out of dust, what flourishes, right? We've come out of a really tough time in the industry. It's harder than ever to be a startup in CPG. So it's really great to see these burgeoning brands that are coming up and doing it their own way. And, you know, being in Baltimore, we're so disconnected from the Austin, LA, Boston metropolises of CPG activity. So it's interesting to see how they're paving their own paths and thinking through really hard things, but succeeding majorly. So don't sleep on me more. I will not.

3:09I will not. We've spoken a couple of times for Taste Radio, the first being in 2021. I think it might be my favorite title of an episode that I've ever penned. The title of the episode was Mason Dixie's founder is the American dream and she's changing baking forever. I got a lot of compliments on that one. And then I got a lot of compliments on that episode period because it was such a great conversation. It was. It was fun. Yeah. Past four years, How are things going? Incredible. I mean, I can't complain. It's been a it was a rough ride for everybody. You know, the first doldrums coming out of COVID.

3:39But I think it really made us a stronger, smarter, more resilient business overall. It forced us to really think about where we can win and how to win smarter. And I think it's made us more efficient in how we kind of get there. So I'm really excited to have this conversation today and get more into those details, too. Yeah. Yeah. Did you ever think that you'd be dressing up as Colonel Sanders? You know, no. And the worst part is that was my stupid idea. It was definitely not a stupid idea. It worked out. It worked out. Fantastic. To the point where you actually ran out of your amazing chicken sandwiches.

4:14Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Ten thousand samples. What? Ten thousand. Ten thousand. And you ran out of them like day one, essentially. One and a half days. Oh, my gosh. Which was incredible. I mean, I can't lie. I mean, Expo was incredible. It's a fun time to be creative and loose with, because it's, you know, that's what I love about CPG. I mean, I came out of management consulting. I came out of automotive. These are very closed, incredibly competitive industries. You don't share anything. You're lucky if you get somebody's real name. You know, you walk around and you get masked cars, right? Like you can't even see the model, even though you know what the body kit is, right?

4:48Like it's just so different being in natural products and especially CPG industry, just because everyone is just so excited to see another human that's going through the same things they are. So it's a fun time to like experiment with marketing and think about how you're portraying yourself to the outside world and see what sticks too. Right. So, you know, this was the first time for us to do a little bit of a breakout from being conventionally safe, even though we've always done something fun, right? Like we broke out with the drive-thru team a couple of years ago and I drove around in that mini child's Corvette.

5:20I still have a broken Cossacks over that. So Oh, geez. Really? No, but I was going to say it was sore for a very long time because shoving an adult butt into a toddler drop top. I don't even know what it was. Cadillac. I think we had whatever it was not good. But, you know, then the following year we did that big shopping cart that we drove around. So those are like fun, safe ways for us to kind of interact with the community. But then we were like, all right, if we're launching burritos and fried chicken, I mean, all you do is think about KFC Taco Bell. Right. I mean, it's natural. Right. So we kind of played on that as like a fun, you know, kind of risque spin because people didn't understand quite like were we like straight copping?

6:01You know, it was a good conversation starter and created some like buzz. I mean, it was funny when our team was walking around the floor. They were like, everybody is talking about the booth because they're like, either word you're going to get sued or they loved it. I never thought about you guys getting sued. But what was most interesting to me is that people were clamoring for the chicken sandwiches and for the burritos at a natural food show. Right. So you're looking at chicken sandwiches made with biscuits, one way with a bun. Yeah. Just burritos made with traditional ingredients that you would expect.

6:33No. I was going to say fake, but plant based, you know, meats or things like that. And it really said something about what consumers really want. in a natural food show or otherwise. And I was thinking about you in particular yesterday because I had a conversation with someone who had said, there's no food in our food anymore. And I was like, you know, Asha and Mason Dixie feel like they were on the front lines of fighting that battle. 100%. I think we might've talked about this when we did our first interview together, but, you know, we weren't even allowed into Expo the first year we tried to get in.

7:13Yes, I do remember that. Yeah, because it was so specific around being dietary or organic or gluten-free or else you could not come to the show. So we actually got a no the first year. So we ended up walking in instead because we did have a restaurant. So we got the restaurant badge. See what's up. Not going to lie. We handed out biscuits. Can't get a ticket now. It's been years. But, you know, when we went back and said, hey, the reality is we're in Whole Foods. The reality is we're in Sprouts. We're in all the natural retailers. and, you know, Expo is saying that we're not natural because we're non-dietary.

7:47And I think that's just not true. There's a big shift right now, whether we like it or not. Right. I mean, RFK is saying a lot of stuff that's making people think about food again. We'll take it. He's nuts, but we'll take it, you know, cause I think it's a win for us brands to really think about what is important because we're also on this, you know, cusp of potential economic decline, right? Everybody's worried about value and price and affordability. And when you're in that mode, you really got to start thinking about approachability of product. It's going to be harder than ever to launch something that requires consumer education, seems tangential to your needs, tangential to your shopping list, and requires human education about what and how to consume it.

8:33But when I started Mason Dixie, remember, as a restaurant, the premise was that it was not okay that in fast food, it was all chemically laden, you know, biscuits with aluminum and fake coloring agents, fake butter. And this is not hyperbole. This is actually what was in. And in some cases, still in the food. 100%. I mean, there's big backlash right now on Chick-fil-A, for example, because people are only finally realizing how many preservatives and chemical additives are in the chicken. And it's like everybody's kid's favorite meal. So even this is now 11 years ago, 12 years ago, that was about all I was trying to forage against, right?

9:15Let's create what chicken and biscuits should be. Let's create what a fun, delicious brunch made of scratch ingredients should be. And what a surprise when When you use less crap, you have lower calories. When you use real whole foods, you have less negative impacts on nutrient load. It's never going to be perfect, but I always think that the most important change comes incrementally. And we kind of saw that with the plant-based movement. You try to tell everyone that they're bad because they didn't make certain choices. It will lash back. It's a rubber band effect, right? I mean, these are American staples that have been industrialized over time for margin, for profit, whatever the reason.

9:55So rolling that back to me was critical. People should not be consuming aluminum in their favorite breakfast bread, right? We should not be using eggs made of pulverized whole egg protein, adding substrate to it to get it to go back. The egg is an incredible thing. It actually holds itself together really well. It's one of the best bonding agents in the world. Why are we messing with it? Leave it alone, right? So we really held onto that premise. And I think for us, when we started to have success in realizing that there's a lot to be done and just cleaning up America's favorite staples. And we really honed in on that kind of really jettisoned us into a very different plane.

10:35Yeah. And people are going to continue to eat these things. They will. Rob Hale, who I introduced you to at Expo West, he is with Stiefel, which is an investment bank. He was blown away. He's like, convenience wise, I can just make this for my kids at dinner once a week and be really, really happy because I'm going to serve them something else that may not be as healthy. And I was like, totally. And if he's a guy, he takes very good care of himself. And I'm sure he takes very good care of his family in terms of their nutrition. Like if he's saying that, then you guys are definitely doing something right, whether it's at a natural food show, conventional or otherwise.

11:07Going again back to our first conversation in 2021, you described Mason Dixie Foods as the modern face of Southern food. But the positioning has evolved a little bit more. You're really just trying to clean up the entire frozen food aisle. And you're looking at the breakfast and lunch occasions in particular. You're tackling a lot. I mean, that's a big vision, a big goal. Why are you looking at everything or seemingly a lot more than the original vision for the brand? So last year, 18 months ago, right, we branched out from just our legacy biscuit sandwich, legacy biscuit heritage into the breakfast section by looking at how American consumers consume that day part.

11:49Right. The interesting thing about it was that if breakfast eaters are incredibly loyal and incredibly ritualistic about what they have in the morning, if you're an oatmeal person, you're having that two to three days a week. You're not really deferring. Right. And what we learned about that was it also happens with the bread base on your breakfast sandwich. People that really love croissants pretty much are going to have croissants two to three days a week. Right. So when we realized that we were alienating a huge market base, we were like, all right, we have to branch out. We've got to think about what are those other American classics that we're not hitting on.

12:21And when we did that, we've had incredible success. I was really surprised. I mean, when we just had biscuits back in the day when we first talked, right, it was like cheddar and buttermilk. It was like the hot dog race of the baseball game, right? Mustard, you know, it was like 50%, 50%. It could be 55, 45, but they were like lockstep. And over the course of time, it started to be that buttermilk was like the lead and then cheddar kept falling back. When we released these sandwiches, all with different base bread types, they've all sold evenly. And you have a pancake, a waffle, a croissant. English muffin.

12:56English muffin. And do you have a bun as well? Well, on the fried chicken. Okay, right. On the fried chicken, yes. So yeah, so people are really loyal to that base, right? So when we started looking at that, we're like, okay, well, what happened really was that we became a restaurant in a freezer. People started to really want their favorites, the customization, right? The have it your way of the American, you know, ordering pattern. was happening in Frozen. And we were getting all these emails like, hey, can you make this? Can you make that? I mean, we got anything from pizza to hot dogs to corn dogs to donuts.

13:33I mean, like people want all their favorite things that have been just obliterated by food industrialization. They want them normal, but they want them in the convenience of their home and quick. Can I pause for a second and ask about normal? Use that word normal. Yeah. And I think that is somehow a word that's been forgotten. Maybe it's the wrong word, but it's a word where I think a lot of natural food brands and companies have lost their way in some ways in terms of what consumers are asking for. They don't necessarily want the most overly complicated type of product. They don't necessarily want to be educated about a new ingredient sometimes.

14:13I mean, even if it's better for you, sometimes just giving people what they want in a better form is the best idea. I encourage you next time you're at one of these trade shows to ask any of these founders, how many of them have actually worked in a restaurant? How many of them have ever seen a human order food, interact with food? Even now, I think one of the biggest things I learned and we got better at over the course of the last four years is what it actually takes to sell our products. And what we were finding was a lot of times if you're hiring CPG industry professionals, they're just reading off the front of pack and they want three to four claims.

14:51And they go into the pitch and they go 17 grams of protein, 200 calories, no sugar, no added sugars. And I'm like, right. But, but the buyer could read that. That's not selling. Also, he probably doesn't give a shit. Everybody's going to say the same thing. Everybody's going to say they're high protein. Everybody's going to say they're low calorie. So what is really going to sell the product? And so for us, it never falters. People want to be romanced. They want to know that these are whole cracked eggs. They're actually fried. We separate the yolks from the whites to get an even cook. We have a higher protein content sausage because we actually create our own grind.

15:28Our fried chicken sandwich has our actual salt brine that we use in the restaurant and a panko breading. They want to be romanced. They want to know what they're eating, right? Because when they go to the restaurant, that's what the server does. And so for us, it's always been around making sure that taste first, sensory first. And when you start to really delve into that, you realize there's not a single human that goes, what is the B6 content? Nobody does that. Nobody does that. And honestly, the questions about carbs and sugars and all that stuff, those are secondary. If you're dietarily constrained, you're probably not even looking at our stuff, right?

16:03Who is your consumer? Our consumer likes comfort food, but they don't like the discomfort of not knowing what's in it. That's just a fact. And when I say normal, it's just what I'm just saying is the average American, you can ask anybody, they're eating a burger once or twice a week. I mean, let's be real, right? They're having a slice of pizza. They're having a milkshake. They're doing those things, even if they lead a healthy lifestyle and run a marathon a week and go to the gym three days. It's all about balance. And, you know, it's funny, the natural products industry got really behind this healthy indulgence.

16:35But then when I looked at the indulgences, they were still dietary. No sugar in the candy. Well, then it's not candy, right? So we got to get away from engineering food. The natural product space started to do that, I think, again, because we're not culinarily driven as much as we really should be. I love the fact that you use the term romanced, romanticizing the food versus trying to educate consumers about the food. Again, the point of reference is so important. And I always go back to a quote from an interview I did with David Lester and Ben Goodwin from Olipop, the co-founders of Olipop. And David had said, if the foundation of your ability to sell your product is tied to educating the consumer, you're pushing a rock uphill.

17:19100%. Yeah. And it's so difficult, costs so much money to get people to understand what you're selling if they don't understand pretty quickly, like within a couple seconds. Yeah. I was hoping you would create a chicken sandwich. I didn't know that that was in the pipeline, but I was hoping you would do it. But it almost seems like, again, if you go to, if you're pitching that to a Whole Foods and they're like, wait, frozen chicken sandwich, we don't sell these kinds of things. How did you think about who might sell your product? Because that's just as important as who's going to buy your product.

17:49You know, it's a misnomer that people think that Whole Foods is, I'll never forget the same because the woman who discovered us and launched us into CPG was an ex-Whole Foods marketing manager. And she always said that the brand needs to get away from being Canyon Ranch. And this was 10 years ago. And I think Whole Foods has successfully done that. There's the idea that Whole Foods has to be completely raw, really raw diet people. And it's not, right? It's people who are super conscious. They have one of the highest trust factors in a brand like Whole Foods. So they come in and they expect to not have to worry, right?

18:26I don't need to actually turn the label around because I trust that it's good, that Whole Foods has done the work for me. That's the benefit of going to a natural retailer. That's why I shop natural, because I don't feel like doing the research of whether or not I could have this cheese or not, because it's got chemical additives in it, right? So the reality is Whole Foods has been for quite some time, even pre-Amazon acquisition, looking for conventionally oriented products comped for natural, done well, done right. And because to your point, the industry is skewed so far away from that, they actually struggle sometimes in certain categories to find things.

19:03And I think our buyer, Chris Manka at Whole Foods has been an incredible champion for sourcing really good food that has a mass appeal orientation and is less dietary. And he's done an incredible job doing that, right? Like I put a post out on LinkedIn the other day because we were featured in this kitchen article and it highlighted this, you know, new era of frozen. And when I think about it, I was like, it's so true. When I go to Whole Foods, there are brands that I really love to have that make tasty food. But I never have to worry about if it's bad for me. I trust the brands that are in there.

19:36So for us, when we looked at fried chicken, I mean, it's like, okay, oh God, there's so many reasons not to. And I actually think you did actually ask me a long time ago if we'd ever do chicken. And one of the challenges actually was who's gonna do it the way we wanna do it? Because no, I don't want that weird processed soy based chicken nugget thing you get at McDonald's, right? I don't want a nasty preformed patty that a Tyson's would do. I want it to make sure it looked, feel, tasted, or had the right mouth feel when you're eating it, just like you would at a restaurant if it's fresh fried.

20:09So, you know, some people are like, oh, why? It needs to be whole muscle. I'm like, okay, if you want to chew on a leather boot after it's been microwaved, okay. There's a lot around doing chicken well, and it's why it's such a lacking innovation set right now. but we narrowed in on it. A few years of really hard work, kind of trying to get what our restaurant formulation was, feel, you know, felt into the formula. And when we presented it, Whole Foods is our launch partner. They've been incredible launch partners. They were surprised. And I think one of the best reactions out of the 10 ,000 samples we gave out and continue to give out is, I can't believe this came out of a box.

20:46That's the reaction you want. And I think Whole Foods really gets behind things that give you that appeal, right? That's the surprise and delight moments that everybody's looking for. Costco looks for that kind of thing too. Sprouts is starting to really look for that thing. So I think it's for us, it was, it's a pivotal moment. It was our number one seller at the restaurant. So I've been waiting for this moment for a very long time. So I'm really excited. I'm glad it's here. Yeah. I think that a lot of people love chicken sandwiches. You can't get a lot of them in packaged form. In fact, I can't even think of one that Whole Foods might have sold prior to yours.

21:21Burritos, on the other hand, seems like there's quite a few frozen burrito brands out there, quite a few that are sold by Whole Foods or carried by Whole Foods. Seems like a much more competitive category to get into. What was your thought process there? So when we looked at incrementality, right, in any grocery store, Tyson's and Kellogg's has 85 % market share. So if there's 100 slots, there's only 15 available. every category review. And you're fighting for those 15 against them and your colleagues, right? In the natural space, it's highly competitive. So when we looked at the sandwich set, I'm really proud of that set.

21:57Our team did a killer job. They're selling incredible. We have 30 % or more year over year growth on those SKUs, same store, same SKU. So they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. So you don't want to disrupt that. So you got to think what is going to be incremental to those innovations that are still giving. And when we pulse consumers, number one requests that came out were other handhelds like burritos and wraps. Wraps is a little challenging. We're still working through that. But on the burrito end, we kind of delved into that. We're like, burritos, that's a surprising thing. We did a numerator study and we saw that we were actually taking share, our breakfast sandwiches were taking share away from natural and conventional burrito brands.

22:36And that was interesting. So like somebody was stopping buying a burrito to go and try a Mason Dixie sandwich. So I'm like, what if I could make them buy both? Right. What if, what if we just give them a burrito that they can trust? And then when we broke it apart, literally, we figured out most frozen burritos are just frozen IQF pieces wrapped in a tortilla. So it looks like those new fancy dog foods, right? That are frozen pellets. That's what it looks like when you break it apart because they're not actually cooked together. They're relying on you when you put it in the microwave to cook it.

23:06That's weird, right? That is like space food. And that's weird. A burrito, I know I'm watching somebody on a griddle, smash that egg up, put that cheese in there, put the meat, you know, like get it all and throw it in the tortilla and then griddle that thing, right? Like make it really, there was nobody doing that. So we went and tried to source a skillet cook, batch cooked manufacturer. We put our formulation together and that's really what differentiates. It's an actual burrito that you would get at a restaurant. The mouth feels incredible. The flavors together are melded and you're not relying on the consumer to cook it for the first time, right?

23:42It's already been melded together. And the beautiful thing is too, we put it in a heat in wrapper. I cannot believe not a single burrito in the category. You can heat in the wrapper. Yeah. There, there have been some attempts, attempts, and they haven't worked out as well as I think the brand wanted them to work. Yeah. And I think about the burritos and how delicious they are, but I also think about your process and how expensive it probably was to create and now how expensive it might be just the quality of ingredients that you use. When you're thinking about developing new products, how much do you think about that price, that price point for end consumers and what they might be willing to pay for a better-for-you burrito, but not just a better-for-you burrito, one that you can say, this has all the things that you ever wanted and none of the crap that you don't want.