Mission Based Sauce

Aug 23

I’m sure many of you have walked down the pasta sauce aisle of your grocery store without even realizing it. I’m also sure you’ve glanced at a jar or two of the many MANY sauce jars on the shelf. Did you ever stop to take a good look at what these pasta sauce brands are actually up to, though?…

… Well, I have and for good reason (hello! we’re a sauce company). More importantly though, to know and really understand who our competition is out there.

We have walked down the pasta sauce aisle many times and have read all the sauce jars on the shelf (i.e., ingredients, manufacturing, design, etc) but we’ve done all this because we were absolutely fascinated by the overwhelming amount of pasta sauces available. By how all these brands are producing the same product with the same names and sourcing from the same places. Some of them having their products manufactured as far away as China (Fun fact: China’s the leading exporter of tomato paste on the planet. It’s also the main ingredient in most pasta sauce brands from all over the world).

Basically, these sauce companies are still distributing the same sauces since Chef Boyardee invented the trend some 90 years ago (I mean he was the pioneer of jarred pasta sauces in this country).

The difference, however, between Chef Boyardee and current pasta sauce brands is that Ettore Boiardi (that was his real name) did it at a time when the USA didn’t even have jarred pasta sauces in the market at all. He would first sell them to his restaurant customers and then eventually was commissioned by the U.S. Military to can his sauces for soldiers overseas. The rest is history! Not to bore you too much with food history (one of my fav topics) but Chef Boyardee became the template for all future pasta sauce brands. In post WWII America, the whole concept of jarring one’s “secret" sauce for customers attracted many Italian-American restaurant owners from the small mamma and papa ones to the overly-priced and pretentious urban ones (which is still going on today).

But hey, if it ain’t broken don't fix it, right? You have a restaurant? Sell a sauce! You’re a celebrity chef? Sell a sauce!! You’re a grocery store chain? Sell a damn sauce!!!

Commercial pasta sauce has become a commodity product that is cheaply made with mostly dry ingredients (including tomato paste), a whole lot of sugar, and tons of sodium (these last two are needed since it would be completely bland without them).

So here’s where we (a small sauce brand) come into play with the overly-saturated pasta sauce category, with a mission to not only make a fresh and delicious product, but to also help and reduce the ever growing food waste problem.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many brands out there that claim to be better for you, nutrient dense, even heart-healthy. But at the end of the day, it’s up to you to make better purchasing decisions. These decisions should definitely be driven by what you read on the nutritional facts panel, but also the mission behind that sauce jar.

And ours is pretty simple: reducing food waste one jar at a time.