Nick Wiseman.

The hummus is the easy part

Walk into an Erewhon in Los Angeles, a Wegmans in upstate New York, or a Sprouts in suburban Texas, and you can find a small refrigerated tub of hummus with a swirl of olive oil pressed into the top. It is freshly spun, kept cold, and gone within days. That tub is the visible end of a supply chain Nick Wiseman has spent the better part of a decade quietly engineering - one that begins not in a factory but in the topsoil of a 5,000-acre family farm in Montana.

Wiseman is the co-founder and CEO of Little Sesame, and in 2026 he is doing something most founders only talk about: building the factory himself. In July 2025 the company closed an $8.5 million Series A led by InvestEco Capital, with Watchfire Ventures, Santatera Capital, Belidae Consumer Partners and a roster of consumer-goods investors joining in. The money is going toward a 23,000-square-foot manufacturing facility - complete with in-house high-pressure processing and a test kitchen - that will quadruple production to as much as 400,000 pounds of hummus a week.

It is a strange thing to watch a chef get this excited about high-pressure processing equipment. But that is the tell. Wiseman is no longer running a restaurant that happens to sell hummus. He is running a food company that happens to be obsessed with where its chickpeas come from, and the manufacturing line is how he keeps the obsession intact at scale.

The growth numbers are the kind that make CPG investors lean forward. Little Sesame has grown more than 100% year over year, expanded into over 1,000 new retail stores in a single year, and at one point accounted for roughly 46% of all hummus-category growth at Whole Foods Market. For a category as crowded and commoditized as hummus - a wall of near-identical plastic tubs - that is not a rounding error. It is a referendum on the idea that people will pay attention to a dip if you give them a reason to.

The investor list reads like a thesis statement. InvestEco Capital led the round; Watchfire Ventures, Santatera Capital and Belidae Consumer Partners filled it out. These are not generalist tourists. They back food businesses where the supply chain and the sustainability story are load-bearing, not decorative. That is the company Wiseman keeps now, and it is a long way from a deli counter in a city better known for arguing about policy than perfecting tahini.

The deli that didn't pencil

Before Little Sesame, there was DGS Delicatessen. Wiseman, a third-generation Washingtonian, opened the Jewish-style deli as a love letter to his city's food heritage. The name came from District Grocery Stores, a 20th-century cooperative of roughly 300 shops, most of them owned by Jewish immigrants from Europe. It was personal, it was historical, and it was - eventually - a math problem.

Procuring quality beef at a price that worked, Wiseman has said, simply "didn't pencil." Pastrami is romantic. Pastrami at a margin is brutal. So he and his partners did something restaurateurs rarely do: they looked one floor down. In the 500-square-foot basement beneath the deli, in 2015, an Israeli chef named Ronen Tenne started making hummus.

Wiseman and Tenne already knew each other. The two had worked the line together at Alto, the New York restaurant run by Michelin-starred chef Michael White. They were line cooks who connected, in Wiseman's telling, over "the same spirit of how we wanted to approach food." When Tenne's hummus turned heads in the basement, the partners - Wiseman, Tenne, and Wiseman's cousin David, a lawyer rather than a chef - formally founded Little Sesame in 2016. By 2018, the flagship fast-casual restaurant was open in downtown D.C. and DGS had closed. The antidote, as Wiseman called the new concept, had replaced the patient.

Then the dining rooms went dark

In early 2020, the restaurant model that Little Sesame was built on stopped working overnight. Wiseman's response was not to wait it out. He turned the shop into a community kitchen and launched Meals For The City, cooking for neighbors hit hardest by the pandemic. It was the kind of move that reads as generosity first and strategy never - but it also taught the company how to produce food at volume for people who weren't sitting at a table.

That muscle became the business. In June 2021, Little Sesame put its freshly spun hummus into 14 Whole Foods Market locations. The packaged product did what the restaurant could not: it traveled. Within a few years the brand was in close to 3,000 stores - Sprouts, Whole Foods, Wegmans, Foxtrot, Erewhon - and the restaurant was no longer the main act. The hummus had eaten the deli, then eaten the restaurant, and gone looking for shelf space.

A founder who reads soil reports

Here is the part that separates Little Sesame from the tub next to it. The chickpeas are American, organic, and regeneratively grown - and they come, almost entirely, from one farmer. Casey Bailey took over roughly 5,000 acres of family land in Montana and spent something like a decade experimenting with how to grow legumes in a way that rebuilds the dirt rather than depleting it. Little Sesame's chickpeas are grown for the brand on that ground.

Wiseman talks about regenerative farming the way other founders talk about user retention. The logic, as he frames it, runs downhill from the soil: healthy soil builds healthy ecosystems, holds more carbon, and - he is careful but unmistakable about this - represents real leverage against climate change. Little Sesame is working with the USDA and its Montana growers to shift 10,000 acres to regenerative, organic farming by 2027.

It would be easy to file this under marketing. The clean-label box, ticked. But the relationship runs the other way. Wiseman built the brand around a farmer's experiment, not the experiment around the brand. When he describes scaling that relationship - keeping all those acres in regenerative practice as demand grows - he frames it in the most disarmingly personal terms.

There is a quiet economic argument buried in the soil story, too. Wiseman watched DGS fail on the math of beef. With chickpeas, the math points the other way: a legume that fixes nitrogen in the ground, grown by a partner who has already done the decade of unglamorous experimentation, sold into a category hungry for a credible clean-label option. The sustainability isn't a tax on the business. In Wiseman's framing it is the moat - the reason a shopper reaches past the tub that costs a little less.

Hummus for kids, and a factory of his own

In late 2024, Little Sesame launched a Hummus for Kids line at Whole Foods - grab-and-go packs aimed at parents who would rather hand a child a chickpea than a fruit snack. Getting there meant solving an unglamorous problem: a lemon supply chain wobble that threatened the recipe. That is the texture of Wiseman's job now. Less plating, more procurement. Less garnish, more capacity planning.

The new manufacturing facility is the through-line. By bringing high-pressure processing in house, Little Sesame controls how long its fresh hummus lasts, how fast it can innovate on flavor, and how much it can make. The test kitchen gives Tenne a place to keep inventing - chef-driven flavors at a scale that would have been unthinkable in a 500-square-foot basement. Wiseman's instinct, repeated across interviews, is that the durable advantage isn't shelf placement at all.

That sentence is doing a lot of work. The relationship with the farmer. The relationship with the buyer who gave a new brand a chance. The relationship with the parent who reaches for the same tub twice. Wiseman keeps building the company outward from those connections, and so far the dirt-up logic has held: take care of the soil, the soil takes care of the chickpea, the chickpea takes care of the rest. From a deli that didn't pencil to a factory that quadruples output, the constant has been a founder willing to start one floor below where everyone else was looking.

What is striking, talking to and about Wiseman, is how little of it sounds like ambition for its own sake. He came up through fine-dining kitchens, where the prestige flows to the plate. He walked away from that toward a refrigerated tub and a soil report. The flavors still matter - Tenne's chef-driven recipes are the reason the product tastes like a restaurant rather than a factory - but Wiseman's attention has migrated to the parts of the business most chefs never see. Procurement. Processing windows. Acreage. The unglamorous machinery of making something good and then making a lot of it without breaking what made it good.

It is a long bet, and Wiseman talks about it on a long timeline - the kind measured in the next generation rather than the next quarter. The 10,000-acre target is set for 2027. The factory comes online and then has to be filled. The kids' line has to earn its place in lunchboxes. None of it is finished. But the shape of the thing is clear: a Washington, D.C. founder who decided that the most interesting thing about hummus was the ground it came from, and built a company to prove it.

Things you didn't know

• He started young. Nick was cooking professionally at age fifteen.
• The co-founder is a lawyer. His cousin and co-founder, David Wiseman, came from law, not the kitchen.
• The name has roots. His old deli, DGS, was named for District Grocery Stores - a cooperative of roughly 300 mostly Jewish-immigrant-owned shops in 20th-century D.C.
• He's also poured cocktails. Wiseman ran Hill Prince, a bar in D.C.'s H Street neighborhood.
• One farmer, one decade. Montana grower Casey Bailey spent about ten years experimenting on 5,000 acres before the chickpeas met the blender.