In the rare world of small-bodied cheese, the best that a product can achieve is widespread fame Tom Colicchio’s exclaims for his favorite flowering peel on ‘Top Chef’.
That’s why Anne Saxelby, the founder and co-owner of Saxelby Cheesemongers in New York City, was so surprised when a supplier told her that a recipe on the popular video app TikTok sparked such a demand for feta that she not get her weekly consignment of cheese.
Saxelby and her feta manufacturer – Narragansett Creamery, a small dairy in Rhode Island – have been whipped up in the video-recipe phenomenon known as baked feta pasta. It is an extremely easy, extremely creamy oven-baked pasta sauce, made with a whole block of feta cheese, tossed in a pint of cherry tomatoes, with olive oil, chili and garlic.
The recipe first caught fire in Finland in 2018 after food blogger Jenni Hayrinen made uunifeta pasta, Finnish for oven-baked feta pasta. (It was a streamlined version of a dish called Prosecco spaghetti and oven-made tomatoes, made by Tiiu Piret, a Finnish food blogger.)
But it did not really rise in the United States until it started getting ecstatic fans on TikTok in early January. The videos are just as likely to be made by influencers as by teens without big fans. Now #fetapasta has more than 600 million views, and this is no exception to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and fans of Rachael Ray, the program “Today” and “Good Morning America”.
[Melissa Clark’s first TikTok video was her one-pan version of the #fetapasta]
By mid-February, when feta was the first keyword in the Instacart delivery program, The Charlotte Observer temporarily reported empty feta shelves at local stores such as Harris Teeter supermarkets. Demand increased by 200 percent, said Danna Robinson, a spokeswoman for the company, which operates more than 230 stores in seven states.
Narragansett Creamery, which supplies Saxelby cheese masters and markets such as Zabar’s and Eataly with its Salty Sea Feta, is now expanding weekly production to £ 6,000 a week, from £ 6,000, said Mark Federico Jr., who runs the business with his parents , said. (The higher figure is how much they previously produced during the summer salad season before the pandemic destroyed restaurant sales.)
Kroger was also caught off guard, said Walshe Birney, who oversees the special cheese benches for the national supermarket chain, which owns Murray’s Cheese. The sales of feta blocks, which bake romer than the crumble, bake.
“This is the largest and most geographical increase in sales in a product that I have personally seen,” he said. Birney wrote in an email.
There is no shortage of feta at Krinos Foods, the country’s largest importer and manufacturer of Greek and Mediterranean food products, but sales have been stronger than usual for months. Eric Moscahlaidis, the chairman of the company, said that Krinos could convince some Walmarts and Costcos to try out sales of real Greek feta in addition to the versions of the cow’s milk they already had. (In Europe, feta is a name-protected product that has to be made from local sheep’s and goat’s milk in certain regions of Greece.)
But feta is not the only food that gives TikTok a boost. And it probably won’t be the last, given the rapidly rising status of TikTok recipes like the baked oatmeal cake and do-it-yourself vegan chicken.
Saxelby sold out of another cheese, Winnimere, after watching a friend’s TikTok video praising the cheese more than 250,000 times in two days. She sold 20 whole rounds in one day – 12 in a normal week – and the Vermont dairy that makes it, Jasper Hill Farm, had a significant traffic peak on its site.
After months of another popular TikTok recipe known as the tortilla wrap hack – you cut, fill and fold a large flour tortilla to make a giant wedge of a sandwich – Olé Mexican Foods, in Georgia, has’ a nationwide sales survey of its burrito-sized tortillas. Most growth has come in cities that are not ‘traditional tortilla markets’, “said Enrique Botello, the company’s marketing manager.
Last spring, Target stores across the country repeatedly ran out of Martinelli’s apple juice, when millions of TikTokers – including singer Lizzo – realized that when you bite into the apple-shaped plastic bottle, it sounds like a crunch in the fruit. .
The 153-year-old California company had to increase its production to keep up, said Tom Brancky, a marketing consultant, who did a weekly PowerPoint presentation last May to keep the business aware of all the video hits. He still sends it out once a month.
“It was phenomenal, it was unreal,” he said, “and it was especially high school kids who ran it.”