The Baton Rouge husband-and-wife team that owns The Cajun Spoon, which sells all-natural dry mixes for popular Cajun dishes, is preparing to launch a new brand of Asian spice mixes that will be carried by Walmart stores across the country.
The new brand will be called The Bamboo Chef and will initially feature five products: stir fry, fried rice, seasoned potato flour, tempura and season all.
“We think this will be 20 times bigger than The Cajun Spoon,” says Ryan Grizzaffi, who founded The Cajun Spoon with his wife, Kristen Grizzaffi, in 2015.
The idea for The Bamboo Chef came from the company’s Walmart buyer, who pointed out the lack of healthful, tasty, easy-to-prepare Asian mixes in the market. He suggested The Cajun Spoon, which is carried regionally in Walmart stores, could create a brand to fill that niche.
That was in December. Now, just three months later, the Grizzaffis have created the brand and the five initial products it will carry, designed the packaging—that’s the part Kristen Grizzaffi, a graphic designer, does—and made plans to begin production of the mixes at their co-packing plant later this spring.
Ryan Grizzaffi expects the first products from The Bamboo Chef to hit supermarket shelves in June. Already, the company has a $200,000 order from Walmart to put the products in some 1,500 stores. He expects those numbers to grow.
“In three months, we’ve built a company that is going national and will be about 20 times the size it is now,” Grizzaffi says. “No one else really has a product like this. We think this will eventually be a multimillion dollar enterprise.”
In 2017, The Cajun Spoon did nearly $400,000 worth of business.
Grizzaffi says he ultimately plans to use The Bamboo Chef and The Cajun Spoon to build a holding company that will own several brands of spice mixes and food products.
He says financing for the new venture has not been a problem.
“We’ve been fortunate,” he says. “Investors are coming to us.”
