Alexandria condiment startup True Made Foods just knocked a new revenue deal out of the park — and over the Green Monster.
The 5-year-old bottled sauce maker locked in a three-year contract with the Boston Red Sox as the exclusive condiment provider to Fenway Park, said founder and CEO Abe Kamarck in an interview. It’s set to start in the 2021 baseball season.
The business — which sweetens its dressings with fruits and veggies in place of artificial sugars — landed the deal prior to the coronavirus outbreak, but didn’t close it until July because it needed to add Covid-19 clauses; for instance, what business looks like if the stadium opens at 50% capacity or with no food service. It’s a great launching pad, Kamarck said, because it gets the company into the distribution side and justifies its investment in new portion-control packaging, such as dip cups, sachets and communal pumps.
But uncertainty remains.
“The only risk right now that we know of is, we’re totally freaked out not knowing what’s going to happen next year with Covid, and knowing what’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen,” he said. “It’s obviously going to come back at some point, and we need to be ready for that. But how much money do we invest and risk waiting for it to come back?”
He declined to disclose financial terms of the transaction but said a full regular season at Fenway Park would mean about $500,000 in potential revenue for True Made Foods, per the franchise’s volume estimates.
The move positions the business to break deeper into food service in the latter half of 2021, assuming a coronavirus vaccine is available and large events are safer, Kamarck said. The company expects to target colleges and universities, stadiums and arenas, and corporate cafeterias, he said. It would also look to expand to other sports teams.
But True Made Foods won’t abandon its retail products, now in about 5,000 stores including Whole Foods Market, Giant Food, Safeway and Wegmans Food Markets locally. It also sells nationally in Kroger, Sprouts Farmers Market, Stop & Shop, Hannaford and others.
In those aisles, the startup has launched new branding and redesigned its labeling, because the “product has always been super strong, but we weren’t getting a lot of organic discovery on shelves. We always knew we needed to change the packaging,” Kamarck said. As proof, he added, Whole Foods “loved us and loved the product — and hated our branding.”
True Made Foods is also readying to roll out new products, including mustards for the first time. It's debuting a yellow mustard with carrots and butternut squash, a brown Bavarian-style mustard with apples and those same vegetables, and a honey mustard with honey, but no refined sugars. The company also aims to introduce two new barbecue sauces, rubs and hot sauces next year to join its existing line of bottled sauces: ketchup, barbecue sauce and vegetable sriracha, dubbed “Veracha.”
The business plans to raise a round of at least $3 million in 2021, allowing it more than two years of runway and its first marketing budget to pursue larger venues and contracts. That funding would follow a $2 million round it closed in summer 2019, enabling its national spread into Whole Foods, additional 1,300 Kroger stores and other West Coast grocers coming on its roster, Kamarck said.
Many of those deals were set before the pandemic started, “and we were lucky,” he said. As some smaller deals were postponed during Covid-19, “at least the biggest accounts still brought us on,” he added. “So we lost some sales, but not a ton — not as bad as it could’ve been.”
The business is still up more than 120% from 2019, already surpassing $2 million in revenue for 2020. The company fell short of its $1 million revenue goal in 2018, reaching about $800,000, but made up for it in 2019 by breaking that target. It’s not profitable yet, but “pretty close,” he said.
Before starting True Made Foods in 2015, Kamarck served in the U.S. Navy as a helicopter pilot until 2008. He spent the next seven years as an entrepreneur in emerging markets, living in Bulgaria, Qatar, Ghana, China and Egypt. He returned to Washington to launch nonprofit Coexist Coffee. That fell apart in 2014, but “got me pretty excited about the food business,” he told us back in 2018. When he saw the market’s shift toward healthy eating, and a friend mentioned the idea of incorporating veggies into ketchup, he said, “it just set lightbulbs off.”
