YouSaid · the spoken record

Alison Roman

lines on the record: 66
first: 2026-02-23
most recent: 2026-02-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Pallets that nobody wants and the bad tomatoes and make Something beautiful from waist, and that's my aspiration. And that business model led down a very, very expensive path. I think it is achievable at massive scale, but we're just not there yet.”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. We use canned tomatoes in the summer. We will do limited edition quantities of things like, you know, bruised tomatoes, sungold tomatoes, like more in-season fresh stuff, but because tomatoes are so seasonal, and I also believe the best tomato sauce does come from canned tomatoes, that part isn't an issue, but it really is. I had worked with this woman at Isabel who had more experience in CPG, and we sort of figured it out together with my chief of staff Narni. And it was kind of the three of us looking at numbers and saying like, who's located where? What is the shipping going to cost? What tomatoes are they using? What tomatoes can they get? What is their capacity? Like how quickly can we grow here? And so all of those things come into factor because honestly the type of shallots you're using at that scale, it doesn't really matter. I think it would be my dream to always use the highest quality ingredients. I'd love to use like old ugly shallow.”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you cannot just multiply that recipe ever. And so I had a bit of experience in the baking world working at scale because you're never making 16 of something in a pastry kitchen. You're making 200. And so you kind of understand. And also conversely, working at the Bonapartit test kitchen, when I first started working there, we were doing a lot more chef driven recipes. And when you work in a professional kitchen, you're making 16 quarts of sauce. You're not making two cups of sauce. So it was sort of reverse engineering that, understanding that it's the same thing, the ingredients, ebb and flow, even if you're decreasing. So it's just kind of having that knowledge ahead of time. But I think that's how those people find themselves as a co-packer. And as we look into other products to make, it's like, okay, well, these guys specialize in baked goods. These guys specialize in granola. These guys, you know, and they're that's what they do. So they, they know.”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I've never heard of that job specifically, but I mean, the guy. Who makes the tomato sauce for us, like that is his primary. I mean, he was a chef, you know, did a lot of catering, private chefing, et cetera. And then I think to understand how to make things at scale, you do have, it's a lot of trial and error. You have to like understand it from a different perspective. But even working in restaurants, I experience this because you take recipes built for a home cook, especially say baking. You're going to make biscuits for a restaurant. You take a recipe that you like from somebody's cookbook. I don't know. And you're like, okay, well, now I have to make these biscuits for, I have to make 200 of them a day. I'm not making 16”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love it. It's the same entity. Okay. So we have the place, the warehouse, where the tomato sauce gets made. They get the jars in, they sterilize the jars, they make the sauce, they batch the sauce, they put them in the boxes. The boxes then get shipped to a third-party logistics warehouse, which is actually not far from where the tomato sauce is made. So we cut down on shipping a bit. And that is where the tomato sauce comes from when you order it online. Because right now we are, we do have it in store up in the upstate grocery store. For a few reasons, which we can also get into, we are just D2C.”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relatively small. Yes, they have big, massive kettles. And I think that also when you think of like why tomato sauce, like I just, I kind of knew that. Getting there would maybe be the path of least resistance in that I'm not inventing something from scratch. We're not. You know, requiring equipment that nobody has. Like these are kettles that you can make many different things in. And so co packers are a bit easier to find these particular co-packers specializing tomato sauce and most that I've encountered do and that's like what they do. And so they are well informed.”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More I explore the CPG world, that is the biggest challenge you can't just send a recipe in and hope for the best. Like you really have to be tweaking and adjusting at scale.”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An issue we can, we'll get there. But if you talk about scaling, it's each co packer is going to handle things differently. And right now we're with a pretty small co-packer, which I like because I can visit them from my apartment. They're in Industry City, Brooklyn. And I go there and I can taste the batches. I can say, okay, we multiplied the chili flake in this recipe and now it's way too spicy. So we're actually going to cut it by half, which is, it seems to stand a reason that that would be not nearly as spicy, but because of the way the ingredients behave, it is, you know, so stuff like that where you're sort of in the lab, as it were tweaking as it goes. And I think that.”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I have no fans, the Challot Pasta will still have a million. Like it is more famous than I am for sure. And that was the trickiest one to nail because the caramelizing of the shallots, the addition of anchovy. I ended up having to go back three times after we had jarred the first batch and adjust the recipe, which I didn't have to do with the others. But because shallots, when you caramelize it at large scale, they tend to get soft and jammy and very sweet, which increases the sweetness perception of the final product, we ended up switching to a different method of cooking the shallots. I ended up reducing the amount entirely, cooking them further. The whole thing had to change as soon as we started getting to the batch size. And each co-packer is different. So I think, you know.”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't wait Yeah, I think that you have to consider, you know, there's a lot of knowledge that goes into it of like your knowledge of cooking and how ingredients, they're not a one-for-one. You can't just multiply it by 10 and be like, this is going to be the same thing. Also, the equipment is different, how they're doing things are different. We have three flavors. We have a garlicky tomato, which is sort of your classic, a spicy fennel, which is spicy and has fennel as advertised. And then a caramelized shallot anchovy, which is modeled after the shallot pasta, which is viral during the pretty popular.”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I also noticed that all the tomato sauces were sort of like chef focused and male dominated energy. It was sort of like a chef, a guy, a bro, a person's name. That was a guy. And I don't know. I just was sort of like, I want to do something totally different, even if it's tomato sauce. I don't think they're all created equal. And so with everything I do, I genuinely try to ask myself, does this already exist? And if not, then I want to make it.”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's what I ate. And I think that that was sort of the gold standard, and people kind of went down that path. And it's interesting because we talk about carbone as like the, you know, top two. They are not very old. Yeah. And so we, in our consciousness, we're like, oh, well, that's the top two. Well, they've only been the top two for as long as they've been around, which somebody can fact check. But I believe it's only a few years. Yeah, that's right. So it's not like this legacy brand that I'm competing with. It's just another company with name recognition, a lot of financial backing and strong branding.”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's an interesting thing because sometimes often people start a business saying, what doesn't exist? There's a hole in the market, I'm going to fill it. And obviously tomato sauce, there are many brands constantly fighting for sale prices and shelf space, but there wasn't a tomato sauce like mine. And there wasn't, I find that most tomato sauces on the market, especially the popular ones, Rose, Carbone, et cetera, are more marinara in style. They are, you know, more uniform in texture. sweeter they tend to have oregano there's just like a specific vibe that they're going for and i think to me sort of modeled after the like old school progresso which is what my mom thought growing up”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I realize it's because I'm well a very picky, bee, probably very snobby. C, I just was sort of, you know, like, I do want to make it myself. I do want the sort of control here. So I made it myself. And when I had opened the grocery store first Bloom, I decided to start including it as like a line of things that we would keep in the freezer, chicken broth, beans, tomato sauce, things that we would make in the store to sell to people at the market. And very soon the demand exceeded supply. And I, you know, for all the things that I do, I did not want to be full-time making tomato sauce. There was just, I didn't have the equipment. I didn't have the time. And so I was approached by somebody who is in the tomato saucemaking business. And she was like, why don't you just outsource it and have somebody make your recipe? And I was like, well, how is that going to work? You know, like won't people know the difference and how could it possibly scale? And through a lot of trial and error, I”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's funny that I then got into tomato sauce business because I've written recipes for tomato sauce and I'm very proud of mine and I think it's delicious and easy to make and anyone can do it. And then the older I got and I married a man who does not cook. I had a baby. The baby does not cook yet either, unfortunately. I needed to eat more. I needed someone to cook for me. And it just became sort of this question I had of like, why am I so allergic to the tomato sauces on the market? Why am I not embracing of the things that are currently available?”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I well, I got my start working in professional kitchens and I worked in editorial, and then I sort of went off on my own writing books and doing miscellaneous things. And my whole career as sort of a recipe writer cookbook author has been teaching you how to cook and being like, why would you buy anything when you can make it yourself? You know, as the person who their pantry is lined with like ingredients rather than things.”
2026-02-23 · Odd Lots · Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source