![\"Riff](\"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/43910496-d916-4aca-822f-2c6027255d4c_2600.jpeg\" "\\"Riff")
Daniel Humm and Mark Ramadan \/ photo courtesy of Riff<\/p>\nDaniel Humm and Mark Ramadan \/ photo courtesy of Riff<\/p>\n
The launch of chef Daniel Humm\u2019s $7 boxed meal kit line at Target may have surprised the legions of fans and followers who associate him with the luxury of Eleven Madison Park, his three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Manhattan. But Riff, developed in partnership with Mark Ramadan, a kind of grocery superstar thanks to his work building condiment company Sir Kensington\u2019s before its reported $140 million sale to Unilever in 2017, has been years in the making. <\/p>\n
The premise, that an ultra-high-end chef would dabble in Target pasta, is jarring. Or, as Grubstreet puts it, \u201cweird.\u201d But Humm is hardly the first to try. (To my left, as I type this newsletter, is my stash of dried Momofuku noodles priced at $11 for four packets, also sold at Target.) <\/p>\n
Similar to the restaurant industry, there\u2019s no guarantee of product success, no matter who you are. The CPG (consumer packaged goods) cycle, from idea to hundreds of store shelves across the country, is long and complicated. Still, the market is white-hot, with an increasing number of chefs and restaurants hoping to get in on the action. Why?<\/p>\n
I asked Elly Truesdell, an investor and CPG expert who spent almost a decade determining which products showed up on shelves at Whole Foods, to help me understand. <\/p>\n
The answer is complex, as Truesdell deftly explained in a recent edition of her newsletter, New Fare. But to start, there\u2019s a market for these new products. \u201cPeople are sort of obsessed with brands and with grocery,\u201d she told me. (I blame Instagram.) <\/p>\n
Lots of other factors \u2014 social, economic, the siren song of a major exit to a giant food company \u2014 might compel a chef or restaurant to seek fame on shelves. Truesdell talked me through everything that goes into packaged-good success (or failure) for a chef or restaurant, including marketing, packaging, audience development, celebrity, and, ultimately, how to judge if a product will thrive. <\/p>\n
This conversation, available to Expedite\u2019s paid subscribers, has been lightly edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
Elly Truesdell, New Fare Partners: \u201cI find this particularly interesting because of Daniel Humm\u2019s profile and background. Being in the industry for a long time \u2014 it\u2019s been almost 20 years now \u2014 I\u2019ve seen a growing number of chefs entering the grocery world. Ten-plus years ago, it was definitely not like this. There was no cachet to launching a CPG brand, there wasn\u2019t the same sort of luster there is today. So it\u2019s not totally surprising to me that people like Daniel Humm are going after consumer goods.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the other hand, it is sort of surprising. There\u2019s some part of me that thinks a lot of the recent culinary ambition that\u2019s going into grocery is largely driven by the exits that they\u2019ve seen \u2014 by dollar signs. I\u2019ve talked to dozens and dozens of people and worked with several to help launch their product lines, and a lot of them are very transparent about this. The tricky thing about that is, once people get into CPG they realize very quickly how hard it is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Daniel Humm and Mark Ramadan \/ photo courtesy of Riff The launch of chef Daniel Humm\u2019s $7 boxed meal kit line at Target may have surprised the legions of fans and followers who associate him with the luxury of Eleven Madison Park, his three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Manhattan. But Riff, developed in partnership with Mark Ramadan,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1512],"tags":[1516],"class_list":["post-8137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-daniel-humm","tag-daniel-humm"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/vive.im\/@dnc\/117327896440635236","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/chefs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}