Alison Roman’s tomato sauce costs $12.99 a jar—and it keeps selling out
I don’t know.” Selling to strangers and fans Those who have followed Roman understand the logic—she, and her fans, are those who are willing to spend a few hours making a nice Sunday sauce, just as they are happy to whip up a quick sauce out of somehow always-way-too-quickly rotting tomatoes.
Key points
- Courtesy of Roman The sauce started last fall as A Very Good Tomato Sauce, sold online and at First Bloom, the grocery store Roman opened in the Catskills.
- Alison Roman built one of the most loyal audiences in food media with best-selling cookbooks, recipes that went viral and a widely read newsletter.
- She keeps her writing and recipe development to herself, but the businesses bring in designers, operations staff—and, of course, the people stirring the sauce.
Additional details
- But even then, people were already calling it Alison Roman’s sauce.
- Roman isn’t the first to have built a brand out of her work, as plenty of big names have built businesses out of their personal brands.
- Roman explained what goes into the sauce: The garlic is sliced, not chopped, and the sauce is cooked in small batches in kettles.
- Changing the name on the jar When she first launched it last year, Roman said fans kept asking why her name wasn’t on the label.
- “If I’m gonna put my name on tomato sauce, or ask you to buy it, I need to make sure it’s really, really good,” she said.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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