Alison Roman’s tomato sauce costs $12.99 a jar—and it keeps selling out

Résumé détaillé

The cookbook author built a cult following one recipe at a time. Now she’s putting her name on tomato sauce she hopes will get more people cooking.

The jars will be sold to shoppers in independent stores nationwide, at a price that’s above what many see as a premium sauce product: Rao’s. Campbell’s bought parent company Sovos Brands in 2023 as part of a $2.7 billion deal, and the sauce sells for about $8. For Roman, she’s open about the price.

“If anything, I think it’s a deterrent,” Roman told Fortune. “But I also think it’s a different product.”

Roman relaunched the sauce as Roman’s on October 21 and began selling it to stores through Faire, its exclusive wholesale partner, which boasted $750 million in annualized revenue last quarter alone and is eyeing an IPO within the next year. Roman’s is one of about 100,000 brands selling to some 500,000 retailers on Faire.

The sauce started last fall as A Very Good Tomato Sauce, sold online and at First Bloom, the grocery store Roman opened in the Catskills. The brand is now in more than 100 stores across 30 states, and Roman is funding it with money from her other businesses rather than through venture capital.

When she first launched it last year, Roman said fans kept asking why her name wasn’t on the label.

“It felt kind of tacky,” Roman said, since everyone knows she isn’t making the sauce herself. But even then, people were already calling it Alison Roman’s sauce. “Unless I named it something completely different that had nothing to do with me, I think people were probably always going to associate it with me and my name,” she said. “And so I kind of doubled down on that.”

That said, having a cool name helps. “If my name were something else, I don’t know that I would feel so bullish on that being my brand name,” she joked.

Roman isn’t the first to have built a brand out of her work, as plenty of big names have built businesses out of their personal brands. Take Shaquille O’Neal’s former agent, Leonard Armato, who told Fortune last month that O’Neal “owned his own brand,” and that the job was finding companies to build value in it.

For Roman, the businesses are a way to…

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