338: Haven's Kitchen

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. When you start acting like something that you're not, or you're trying to be something different from what your core is, people can feel it and sense it, and it comes out in your pores. Some of these grocery stores are like, we're super into innovation. Like, yay, we love young emerging brands. I'm like, we want to do all these DEI things. And then you're like, but you don't. So just don't. Be who you are. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard. Allison Cain is the founder of Haven's Kitchen, a pioneering culinary school, cafe, and consumer brand that has been at the center of the New York City food world for nearly a decade.

1:09I absolutely loved catching up with Allison about her journey to launching the company and some of the wild events she has thrown over the years. We also talk about her pivot to the world of CPG and how she makes it all work in this very competitive world. It's a great talk, and I hope you enjoy this conversation.

1:34Allie Kane, welcome to This is Taste. How are you? I'm great. I'm psyched to be here. It's so cool to meet you. I've been to Haven's Kitchen when you ran it. The physical space, the cooking school. We'll go over the history of that. I think many of our listeners who have lived in New York have been to an event at Haven's Kitchen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things where I didn't know how special it was until it was over a little bit. You know, I was just kind of building it and making it. We rode a really cool wave, I think, you know, 2012 to 2018 in New York City was just food and the beginning of experiential CPG things and so much innovation, so much creativity and so much money.

2:17It was definitely money was flowing into events. It was a great time for events. I remember going to a couple of Fiden book events. I went to a great, you did a fundraiser. I think it was like a Trump related fundraiser. Definitely. Yeah, I did a lot of those. It was a MAGA. Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. And. Yeah, no, it was it was anti-Trump. That is what I meant to say. It was a fundraiser for activism and. Farm labor practices. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We did a lot of, you know, the goal really was to be a nonprofit in a way that didn't have to fundraise. Yeah. You know, that was my thought going in. It turned out to not be my end goal.

3:02No. But that's, I really wanted to use it to support, you know, better food system policy and all sorts of stuff and awareness. And I had no idea that this cooking school was going to be an event space for, you know, Google. Yeah. I mean, who knew? But it was it just it was a great ride. Well, the location was was ideal because it was like downtown, but not too quite downtown. But also remind me what corners was 17th between six and seven. Right. So Flatiron definitively and just a really great space like multilevel. And I remember going to a piglet. Yeah. There was amazing. And you just I think you just had a great taste or you allowed people in there with great taste.

3:45Yeah. I think we had, you know, it's the same thing with teaching people how to cook. I think when you make it, when there are too many choices, people get analysis paralysis and they kind of freak themselves out when you're like, okay, here are the bones and this is, you can't mess this up. But if you want to have fried chicken, great. If you want to have sushi, mazel tov. Like we don't have, we're not like chef doesn't, chef doesn't do it that way. You know, it was, it was easy. Yeah. And so you closed Haven's Kitchen, the physical space around the pandemic. But you have since kind of, I would say, reinvigorated the brand as a CPG brand, a consumer packaged good brand that focuses on sauces.

4:30So catch us up to what Haven's Kitchen is now. Yeah. I mean, now we are what we call ourselves as a creative home cooking company. You know, we have our second product line coming out in February. The goal is really to be sort of the meal kit without the meal kit. So, you know, I've taught cooking for 25 years. and I know that like we were just talking about with events people don't want a prescriptive constrictive you have to make this and this is what it's going to look like you know dinner they want to be able to choose do I want salmon do I want chicken do I want tofu and most of the time it's just I don't know how to get the right seasoning or flavors so our sort of solution is wherever you need flavor or seasoning or possibly texture will be that.

5:19You choose your protein, your veggie, your grain, whatever. And so the idea will really be to build out a portfolio of products that will help home cooks feel great. And a lot of the products are sauce-related. We're talking about flavor and seasoning. You're applying terroir and region and specific heritage foods into a sauce that's in a tetra pack or a jar. and you're adding it to protein and vegetables. Yeah. I think, you know, we, the question people always ask me when we just were the brick and mortar, you know, we were cooking school and in 2018, we had our first purchase order from Whole Foods, 14 stores, you know, three sauces.

6:00And then 2020 went national with Whole Foods and that's, things have really taken up. Did Ellie Truesdale pick you up? No, it was John Lawson. But, you know, I think people would always say what kind of cooking school, you know? And, and I'd be like, there's so much amazing food from all around the world and American home cooks are excited to try different global flavors. I'm never going to say this is my family's secret recipe. There's a very, you know, strong line between like appreciation and appropriation, which I think we're very careful about. But the idea is to really bridge if you're curious about Southeast Asian flavor, but you're not quite ready to like make a whole meal and dig into hacking a lemongrass stock, or you're not quite sure which of the, you know, curries to sort of go into in that aisle.

6:54We have something that just bridges you there. What are some of your most popular SKUs? I mean, the chimichurri is definitely a winner. I think that people kind of know what to do with it. You know, romesco is a little esoteric, I think, for consumers. Tahini's growing on people. Ginger miso is the number two, because I think people just think like, I know that this goes on salmon. How do you make it different then? I mean, this is a very crowded category. There's a lot of great sauces out there. They've gotten better and better. Some are refrigerated, some are shelf stable. Yeah. You know, some have like a high price point somewhere.

7:29I mean, they're very, There are multitudes. How do you do it? Yeah. I mean, in 2017, when we first met with Whole Foods, there were no other refrigerated sauces. It just wasn't, you know, everything was in a glass jar or, you know, a hard plastic, you know, squeeze bottle in the condiment set. We were sort of the first. There are still very few sauces in pouches. Again, there is innovation there. And, you know, we have worked really hard to sort of, you know, stay true to really clean label, you know, as close to what someone would consider authentic as possible, although that's defined differently by everyone.

8:13And I think what really has distinguished us is we have incredible trust from our consumer and we have always been super consumer focused. So there are a lot of sauces that come out, a lot of condiments out there, more so in the last couple of years for sure since COVID. And they're all sort of, you know, if you buy this, then you become part of our cool kid club. We've never been a cool kid club. I'm not a cool kid. So we've always been like, we don't actually, this isn't about us. This is about you in your kitchen trying to get dinner on the table in 15 minutes. So our mindset is just different.

8:55I mean, if the chimichurri is super good, you're going to get return customers. No, no. I mean, we have incredible repeat and our velocities are super strong, which is a fun CPG. I love that term. We'll get into CPG jargon in the world. I mean, are you seated in like hungry root boxes or any of those? How do you market your sausage? We've been, I mean, pretty much brick and mortar retail since day one. um we it's a refrigerated product it's hard it's hard to ship it's hard to receive um so we've really been focused on building out you know I'm I think I have just a brick and mortar brain so when the world was kind of like get as much distribution as possible and just like you'll pay for it eventually and somehow it's all going to be fine my brain was like I can't afford to buy toilet paper this month.

9:48So I'm just going to hold off, you know. So, you know, we've never overextended. Whole Foods is a great business for us. Sprouts is a great business for us. We're in a couple of conventional accounts. The fresh market's great for us. But it's definitely, you know, there is more distribution coming. But I think with a fresh product that doesn't have an exact category in the store because it's not in condiments, right? It's in this like fresh netherworld a little bit. When you refrigerate a product, it just like, it sells faster. It's like right there in this immediate section of the grocery store.

10:24Like, Olipop knows this. That's what their model is based on. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, 95 % of the RTD beverages, right, in that set do not need to be refrigerated. They're just there because they're cold and they're ready and they know that they move fast. Sauces are a little different. I do think we have a nice, high velocity, you know, like we do, that's the units per week. And you do command a little bit of a premium being fresh because the consumer does value that. It's just, you know, it's kind of like in some stores we're in the fermented foods next to the sauerkraut and the kimchi and other stores were next to the salad dressing and other stores were in meat.

11:07So it becomes a little hard to ask a consumer to go hunt for us in their grocery store shop. Where do you want to be? What's like, are you, are you like, do you want to be like cozy enough with meat or do you like feel like kimchi and slaw is like your guy? Well, I, we're not fermented and, um, kimchi and slaw is not necessarily where the bulk of people are running when they go to the grocery store. Yeah, not a traditional grocery store. Yeah. So it works in a, it works in a, in a health food store. Um, I, it's a, that's a really good question. I mean, in 2019, if you asked every grocery store in America, they were like, we're building out more fresh.

11:48We know we need refrigerated condiments. The consumer wants the perimeter of the store. They want better for you. Then they got hit with a pandemic where they were basically like, all we need to focus on is hand sanitizer and toilet paper. And so whatever strategic plan that was, and now they have a major labor crisis and an inflation crisis. So that's not happening. So now I have to figure out, I want to be in the same place so that a consumer always knows where I am and is like, oh, that makes sense. Figuring that out is a little challenging. We'll get into a little bit of the figuring out part later in this conversation.

12:27But I want to talk about CPG content. You host a podcast in The Sauce. It's great. I do. And I'm going to link to it in the show notes. So you actually follow the world. And, you know, CPG, a grocery store, is like a micro theme here. We have founders on often, but it's not what we do. But I wanted to have you in because you have this great sense in your podcast and in your writing about this world. And it seems to me, and this is an observation, is that CPG content is having a bit of a boom. Like, Erwana was just on the cover of fucking New York Magazine. Nate Rosen, Andrea Hernandez run these cool CBG newsletters that have crossover into the mainstream media.

13:09People love these guys. And then, of course, there's Emily Sundberg's Feed Me, which is like a must read in general across retail, across media. I just like her photos. Dude, selfies? The LinkedIn posts. The selfies are so funny. She's great. She's a must read. But I bring her up because she focuses on food and CBG quite a bit. And like five years ago, one of the most followed media newsletters would not be covering the grocery store. So let me ask you, is this the most interesting part of food media right now? I think that's a good question. I'm sort of seeing like in my head as you're talking, I'm seeing like a bicycle wheel in the center of the bicycle wheel and then all these like spokes coming out of it.

13:49So I'll unpack my brain a little bit. But number one, I think we cannot emphasize enough what happened to what we all thought of. And you and I kind of like grew up in, in like what food content was. It was recipes. It was Martha. It was Bonap. And it's like everyone in their chambray shirt age, right? Like, do you remember that? Oh, totally. There was like, what are we all wearing? Oh my God, Andrew Nolton. No, I mean, I remember, and I remember being like, what am I missing? But that's all gone, right? Mostly because there is so much food content. There's so many different channels. There's so many different places.

14:29It's totally democratized. It's free. So what's interesting, I mean, I also just at some point, like how many more roast chicken recipes can there be? And why do we all need 27 pages of SEO to get to that recipe? And then have a really bad ad load experience. Yeah. And by the way, maybe it worked. The only person I ever, I know his recipes always worked. And that was something for me when we were making our recipes, they have to work. But so I think that I think secondly, you know, the sort of behind the scenes founder journeys have sort of replaced the behind the scenes chef's journeys. You've talked about that on your show.

15:09the sort of power chef days. I think the combination of, you know, the Me Too stuff and just sort of the fatigue and exhaustion. I think I think fatigue. I think the labor practices. I think there's just been people don't want to worship those people anymore. So unfortunately, people need someone to to kind of worship. I think that's just how media works, maybe a little bit. And so you have these founder stories and the founders have sort of taken on that role. And so you have people talking about this business as if it's a TV show. I'm sure there's going to be more Shark Tank-y type of things.

15:52I'm sure they're going to be following businesses type of things. and and so I think it's interesting and it's something that you know you can go buy for four dollars instead of going to spend your you know rent on to have a meal and then hopefully maybe get to take a picture of it well I think all those things happen well said Allie I mean I think you hit so many points and you really thought that through and I um agree mostly on the chef thing though I think I would just like reframe it and say for me it's like we are not picking the chefs we want to pick versus it being like they're all kind of not good.

16:28You're not saying that, I know, but I think we've been able to siphon out the ones and the people who are irrelevant. There's real relevance for the chef community, but also the small luxuries in life is picking up a really cool spice or picking up a sauce or picking up a product. And, you know, it doesn't cost a lot. The berry entry is very low, but it excites us. It's like makes our evening at home a little more better. Totally. I mean, Andrea said it on your podcast about Walmart being the new Kif. I wrote you and I was like, this is amazing. What a great line. You know, when you have kids going to Walmart and taking a picture with a coffee or a Pop-Tart and that's their big TikTok post, you know, that's cool.

17:12That's great. You know, I mean, it's there. There's a lot that I think oversimplifies it. But, you know, there's a lot more pain in this business than people talk about, which I'm fairly open about, I think. But, yeah, I mean, I think it's content that people enjoy and it's also very accessible to them. I love it. You talk about the storytelling around founders coupled with the product discovery. I want to shift gears and talk about the grocery store. And, like, I've talked about this with several on the show and I wanted to get your take. Like you work in CPG and you work with distributors and big chains.

17:52Why is the current grocery store model so fucked up? It seems like you talk to everyone and it's just there's so much waste and the barrier to entry is so fucking high. And I wonder from a founder's point of view, like if you agree, and secondly, how do we fix it? So how we fix it, I don't know. I remember in like 2018, 2019, one of the reasons why I was happy about diversifying out of brick and mortar into a product was because I kind of knew that, you know, our rent was good. Labor was manageable. People were willing to pay. You know, the weather had been nice. Like there was just everything needed to be okay because the margins on that business are so slim.

18:42The margins on a grocery store business are even slimmer. So if one of those bows or whatever bows breaks, right, I mean, the trucks need to be able to get there. We had major supply chain and logistics issues. We don't have people who want to drive trucks anymore. We don't have people who want to stock shelves anymore. And, you know, what, again, going back to the money, there was so much venture money. And so, you know, the way that these grocery stores make their money isn't by selling the condiment or the spice or the Pop-Tart. The way they do it is through ad spend and marketing dollars from the brands.

19:25Yeah. Retail advertising is a billion dollar business and retail advertising is not talked about that much. No. And the way that the brands get that money, it's not from selling the Pop-Tart, right? It's from venture. And if that dries up, we're going to have less to spend. They're going to have less to spend. And so a reset, if you think about how hard it is for a grocery store to meet all of the different condiment people. We're all clamoring. We're all like, we have the best condiment. We have the best condiment, right? They're like, thank you. They have a thousand of us on their desk. Then they need to make their selections, do the thing, revamp all of the planograms.

20:03And then within a week at every store, they need all of those shelves cleared and all of those shelves reset. Why would they do that frequently? It's a massive undertaking. So it's always been a precarious system because the margins have never really made a ton of sense in their natural state. And now we're seeing between like global supply chain issues, labor issues, an economy where people are not comfortable spending. There's a lot of pressure on a planet that's being cooked by waste. Totally. Talk about some of the most wasteful businesses are groceries. Yeah. I mean, and you have a consumer, and I used to talk about this a lot with food, you know, when we had the brick and mortar, you have a consumer who has been trained to think, A, that food should be cheap, and B, that human labor is free.

20:59and, you know, making something of quality with integrity and doing it in a fair and decent way is too expensive, really, for what the consumer is willing to spend for it. Can you take a crack at how a grocery store should look in 20 years? Take like a crack, like this is not a perfect exercise. So I'm not going to give you a satisfying answer because I have a very strong feeling about a grocery store can look like Walmart. A grocery store can look like Costco. A grocery store can look like Happier or Air One, but it has to look like what it looks like. It has to be what it is and it has to have brand integrity.

21:45So Air One works because Air One is a marketing channel and they know that and they stick to it and they're great at it and it works and it should look like that. Costco works because they have a tiny selection. I think they have like 3 ,500 SKUs or something like that. Are you kidding me? Tiny. Wow. I mean, have you listened to the Acquired podcast? Yeah, definitely. Is that a good Costco? Whoa. The Costco one, the Walmart one, they're both amazing. But the Costco one, I'm like, this is the best company in the world. They have like an average of a 17-year like employee retention average. Like it's insane.

22:22well done Costco and we're not in Costco so they also make like the best uh pumpkin cheesecake I mean their Kirkland thing is a whole thing pumpkin cheesecake like that is the guy they're they're they're so so nothing nothing should look like Costco if it's not Costco but what you're seeing is like with any organization right a school a business yourself as a human when you start acting like something that you're not or you're trying to be something different from what your core is, people can feel it and sense it and it comes out in your pores. Right. And so that's what's happening. Some of these grocery stores are like, we're super into innovation.

23:02Like, yeah, we love young emerging brands. I'm like, we want to do all these DEI things. And then you're like, but you don't. So just don't be who you are. Walmart is who they are. It's a satisfying answer, Allie. Thank you. I think you're because you're I'm asking the impossible. It can't look like a specific thing because we live our world in multitudes and we don't always need an Erewhon in our life. No. And for the times you do, it's great to have them. Have you ever walked into a restaurant and been like, I can see the Pinterest board. I can see the decorator being like, you should definitely use this green because they saw it, whatever.

23:37But you can feel that it doesn't have like a heart and a soul underneath. That's the same thing with grocery stores. When they are what they are, it doesn't matter if it's like super value or like super high end. You feel it in your body. Do you remember when like Just Salad hit New York the first time? And then all the other ones came in like the early 2000s? That is what you're describing. I mean, there was a there was a I shall not name it. There was another cooking school that literally ripped off our logo, our design, our classes. is they came to like 40 classes that year and it was a little fishy, but then they opened this thing and it enraged me.

24:23And someone said to me, it was Liz Newmark, and she said, they could open a heaven's kitchen across the street from you. It could look literally exactly the same. People might go once, they're not going twice because there's something in the air. And that's just like, Like that's just it's the same thing with a product. You taste something. You're going to try it once maybe if it looks cool and the packaging is cool and like some content creator made it and tells you to go get it. But if it's not like satisfying, it's sort of like, I don't know, spiritually, for lack of a better word, you're not going to go back.

25:00It's so interesting. We're talking about copycat culture and we can even drill down to it deeper because, you know, with a physical space, you know, there's a lot going on. You can definitely sniff it out. But when we're talking about like a probiotic soda, there's like, you know, four of them. And, you know, I have my favorite and you may have your favorite. I can't drink any of them. If you can't drink any of them. I can't drink anything fizzy. Oh, is that just like bad for your teeth? No, I just it makes me like pick up and. Makes you feel not great. Yeah. I'm sorry. That's OK. That was the same way.

25:30No, but you missed on a Crystal Pepsi. I like gin and tonics. You missed on a Crystal Pepsi. Yeah. I like gin and tonics. Oh, yeah. Does that count? I think a gin and tonic, you like, you know, can choke it down once in a while. Yeah, make it work. But like, you know, we don't know which probiotics to pick. Right. And like, if you're copying in CPG, it's like a little different, I feel, than like a physical space. Yeah. I mean, first of all, what a waste of money. I mean, it's just so sad. And I always, you know, it's not nice. But again, I picture people being like, there's this huge market and there's this white space.

26:06And these guys are doing great. So let's just like do this also. And again, there's no there's no heart behind it. It's not cynical either. It's like facts. I mean, I think so. I think the other thing is I had I had someone on my podcast because I went into a bookstore like two weeks ago and the front table was all these memoirs and they all looked exactly the same. They all had like a black and white thing and like someone looking kind of serious and then like a font. And those people, the people who designed the jackets did not copy each other. They were all probably riffing off of something and it just kind of came out.

26:45There are sort of these like zeitgeists that happen. And, you know, puffy Burger King font is really in, but then like minimal sort of like hard to read. Now it's going to be like gaming font and whatnot. Oh, my gosh. Gaming fun is so real. And the media kind of leads the conversation, I feel. Totally. You look like the art directors at New York Magazine lead the conversation. And you look at, you know, like sub stacks, like people doing like their own fonts as headers of sub stacks. I mean, George Harrison had that whole court case back in like, you know, because he accidentally, you know, copied a song.

27:19And he got like, he like plagiarized. And he was like, I wasn't alive. I mean, I might have been little. But I've read he's like, oh, my God, I had no idea. I'm so sorry. Yeah. You these things enter your your brainwaves a little bit. They're all over. You're just inundated with these images and you start to think you're having an original thought and it's not original. the problem is is that people don't these teams are getting they're they're running too fast and they're they're trying to get stuff done in a way where they're they're not being intellectually honest with themselves and looking back and being like wait this might actually look a lot like someone else's stuff you know but like it's the guys the the hypothetical guys in the in the boardroom and like talking about white space and talking about brand guidelines and how can we how can we like leverage you know a love of of a pink millennial pink remember that whole thing oh i remember i think i actually started canary yellow oh i just want to say that publicly yeah we're on the record so canary yellow talk about was this a power this is a haven's kitchen no it was in my house and it was 2012 and i just want to say okay canary yellow might be me it was your house what room was it it was the living room i have these two and and i and i the couches are because there was a like a canary yellow nike that i was like obsessed with from this like japanese nike book from the 80s and i was like i want couches that look just like those sneakers and so i put these two like canary yellow again a segue yeah no it's a good segue but um they were they're in my living room and then you know things started becoming canary yellow I just I'm going to give myself credit for that.