A new wave of brands are taking pantry staples beyond everyday essentials and changing how consumers use familiar products.
Brands offering mustard and pasta sauce to tahini and pistachio spreads during the Summer Fancy Food Show last month are entering established categories, and expanding how consumers use products they thought they already knew.
Expanding occasions and use cases
Many emerging brands are showing shoppers new ways to use familiar pantry staples, rather than asking consumers to adopt entirely new products.
Rachel Simons who is the CEO and founder of tahini and halvah brand Seed + Mill said the company has spent a decade encouraging consumers to look beyond the sesame seed-based tahini’s traditional role in hummus and falafel.
“We really wanted to bring [tahini] back to life, breathe fresh air into it, and encourage people to think about it differently,” such as spread for sweet treats like ice cream, brownies and cookies, Simons explained.
Seed + Mill’s squeeze bottled tahini sauces are available in three flavors, Organic Spicy, Chocolate Sesame and Organic.
Similarly, Michael Januska, owner and founder of Pop Mustard said the brand’s fermented and pickled whole-seed mustard is more like a versatile ingredient than a sandwich spread.
The brand partnered with Michael Symon, a James Beard Award-winning celebrity chef, in 2024 to help formulate recipes. Pop’s whole seed mustard lineup includes Original with pickled jalapenos and lime, Spicy with jalapeno, habanero and chili, and Smoked.
“It could be used in dressings, marinades, or you could just use it as a dip,” Januska said.
He argued Pop fills a new space within condiments, especially mustard, where “no one’s going to stick a cracker into a Dijon ... but with Pop, you could just use it purely as a dip.”
Taking specialty products mainstream
Seed + Mill and pistachio spread brand Pistakio founders are seizing an opportunity to introduce their condiments into everyday kitchens.
Simons described tahini’s placement in retail as “this sort of dusty kind of ethnic aisle at the supermarket, where people weren’t sure what it was.”
Pistakio’s Founder Francine Voit said pistachio creams were already popular in Europe, but there was still an opportunity to make them more approachable in the US. Pistakio’s lineup includes two textures – creamy and crunchy – in 8-ounce tubs.
Pistakio focused on making the products easier for everyday use, first through texture innovations and now through packaging. Voit said consumers are already using the spread across multiple occasions.
“Our DTC customers are already drizzling our creamy spread on everything that they have at home,” she said.
The forthcoming squeeze bottle further simplifies usage and even expands into desserts and unlikely beverages like coffee, Voit added.
Adding modern benefits to familiar categories
Other brands are modernizing pantry staples by layering in attributes that resonate with today’s health-conscious consumer while maintaining familiar flavors and formats.
For Pop Mustards, the mustard’s recipe contains pickled mustard seeds, adding to a clean label positioning, according to Januska.
“Some of the other mustards are ultra processed and [ours has] super clean ingredients, prebiotic,” he added.
Liana Krasnow, who is the founder of premium pasta sauce startup Noodo, said she set out to rethink a family pasta sauce recipe rather than simply replicate it. Her initiative led her to replace wine with bone broth as an additional savory component for Noodo’s three flavors: Smooth Tomato Sauce, Chunky Tomato Sauce and Smooth Vodka Sauce.
“How can I get that richness of flavor without adding actual meat into the product?” she explained when considering an updated version of her family recipe.
Notably, the goal of adding bone broth wasn’t to change the eating experience but “just to have the benefits of using bone broth,” Krasnow said.
For its tomatoes, Noodo switched suppliers to eliminate citric acid (a stabilizer) from the ingredient list and sources California grown tomatoes, which are “a little bit sweeter naturally without any added sugar,” she said.
As a result, the brand is working on “slight changes” to the packaging to include “no added sugar” and “no citric acid” on the front of pack, Krasnow added.
