food-retail
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Venda Ravioli sells dinner. The spoon has opinions.
A Providence pasta maker turned a neighborhood specialty into groceries, catering and gifts. Its next sale might be a tray of chicken Parmesan or an entire Italian night in a box.
Tammy Sadinsky’s Playbook for Making Heritage Brands Feel Useful Again
After three decades across cereal aisles, coffee counters, checkout lanes, banking apps and classrooms, Tammy Sadinsky keeps returning to one practical question: what does this brand make easier for people right now?
M&M Food Market Was Frozen in the ’90s - Then It Let Shoppers Open the Freezer
The Canadian frozen-food chain had a tired name, blank white boxes and a counter customers found intimidating. Its comeback began with a wonderfully literal idea: let people browse.
The Dessert Chain That Sells You the Controls
At Menchie's, the customer is part pastry chef, part portion controller and part kid in a candy store. That small transfer of control turned a Los Angeles yogurt shop into a durable franchise - one weighed cup at a time.
California Pizza Kitchen Wants to Be Everywhere You Don’t Need a Waiter
The chain that made barbecue chicken pizza a mall-era staple is betting its next act on a wider idea: CPK wherever people eat, from hearth ovens to grocery aisles and vending machines.
The Grocery Chain That Bet Small Stores Could Win the Health Aisle
Founded by a fruit-stand family, Sprouts skips the premium-organic playbook - smaller stores, produce up front, and shelves sorted by diet instead of brand.
The $4.4 Billion Grocery Chain That Still Makes Its Own Ice Cream
Brookshire Grocery Company has run stores across the Ark-La-Tex for nearly a century - baking its own bread, bottling its own milk, and betting that owning the whole supply chain beats renting it.
Giant Food
For 90 years Giant Food has run the same play in the same four zip-code clusters: know the Beltway shopper better than anyone from out of town ever could.
Vallarta Supermarkets
A family butcher shop became a regional grocery chain by treating tortillas, carne asada and pan dulce as infrastructure - not ethnic-aisle decoration. Forty years later, Vallarta is carrying that fresh-food system beyond California.
Jason Potter
Jason Potter is the President and CEO of Grocery Outlet, the Emeryville-based bargain grocery chain known for its independent owner-operator model and treasure-hunt aisles. He took the top job on February 3, 2025, after nearly five years steering The Fresh Market and 26 years climbing through Sobeys, Canada's national grocery giant. He started bagging groceries at 13 in a small Alberta town and has been in the trade ever since.
Amrit Robbins
Amrit Robbins is the CEO and co-founder of Axiom Cloud, a San Jose-based AI-powered refrigeration management software company serving grocery chains and cold storage operators. A Stanford-trained engineer and Forbes 30 Under 30 alumnus, Robbins previously co-founded Axiom Exergy — a hardware-first thermal energy storage company — before pivoting to software in 2020 with Axiom Cloud. His work addresses refrigerant leaks, which rank #4 on Project Drawdown's climate impact list, with a platform that requires no new hardware, deploys remotely, and earns payback in under a year.