Immediately chef/entrepreneur David Chang and his group introduced they’d raised $17.5 million in development funding for his packaged items model, Momofuku Items.
The corporate, which sells “a line of restaurant-grade pantry necessities,” was based in 2019 and spun out of Momofuku a 12 months later. In response to the announcement, the funding shall be used to broaden Momofuku Items’ product choices and help its rising operations.
Chang’s preliminary success hawking Chili Crunch is little question one motive buyers noticed potential within the model. When launched in April 2020, Chang’s spicy add-to-everything sauce (creator professional tip: attempt a dollop in vanilla yogurt) created a 20,000-person-long ready checklist. Chang started so as to add to the product portfolio in 2021, including air-dried noodles which have since bought greater than 5 million servings of noodles to this point.
“We spent a decade testing and creating our pantry necessities, making certain that they have been as much as the requirements we uphold in our eating places,” mentioned Chang. “With this funding, I’m trying ahead to bringing much more taste to residence cooks’ kitchens.”
The sort of transfer into packaged items is a part of a broader development amongst cooks with large followings trying to capitalize on their model fairness in new and fascinating methods, notably after the arrival of COVID. Chang (who technically dipped his toe into the pantry items pool earlier than the arrival of COVID) is especially well-positioned to money in on a line of pantry necessities given his distinctive however typically comparatively easy takes on Asian meals.
Whereas they might not have the identical movie star chef cachet as Chang, the sister group behind the Omsom model has proven how profitable the Asian meal “starter” CPG enterprise could be. Omsom began providing its sauce starters again in 2019 by a DTC mannequin and might now be discovered in Goal and Entire Meals.
