The CPG arm of Philadelphia's James Beard Award-winning restaurant group has expanded its refrigerated hummus line to 185 Whole Foods Market locations across 20 states, adding Hummus Matbucha and Hummus Harissa alongside a simultaneous push into Bristol Farms, Barons Market, Giant, Harris Teeter, and McCaffrey's. The move brings Zahav Foods — co-founded in 2024 by Chef Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook — to near-national refrigerated shelf presence less than three years after launch.
The Retail Footprint
The distribution map is worth unpacking for buyers and brand-launch advisors. Whole Foods coverage now spans the Pennsylvania, Mid-Atlantic, North Atlantic, DMV, Colorado, and South Pacific regions, with key city markets including Boston, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Denver, and San Diego. Bristol Farms is carrying all four Zahav SKUs across 14 Southern California locations, while Giant is expanding from 31 to 51 Pennsylvania and Mid-Atlantic doors and adding two new flavors. Harris Teeter, onboarded in November 2025, is now stocking Hummus Schug across 217 locations — a scale jump that signals a national-chain confidence tier that few emerging refrigerated brands reach this quickly.
The brand reports a No. 6 ranking among 129 reported hummus brands in NielsenIQ's latest 13-week data. That kind of category velocity from a brand barely 18 months old on shelf is the metric that gets a buyer's attention in a crowded refrigerated dip set.
What's Driving the Velocity
The product architecture is deliberate and defensible. Each flavored variety layers a distinct condiment — Moroccan-style matbucha (roasted red peppers, tomatoes, onions), North African harissa (Aleppo, guajillo, chipotle, and bell peppers), and Yemenite schug (fresh serrano, parsley, cilantro) — over the brand's six-ingredient base hummus. That base uses roughly four times the standard amount of roasted tehina sourced from Soom Foods, which the brand positions as the first tehina-forward hummus on U.S. grocery shelves. The 10 oz packages retail at $7.99 at Whole Foods and carry Non-GMO, Gluten Free, Kosher, and Seed Oil Free certifications — a label stack that aligns with where premium grocery buyers are allocating shelf space in 2026.
For operators and brand advisors tracking the restaurant-to-retail pipeline, Zahav Foods is a clean case study. The brand launched exclusively at Whole Foods in January 2024 — a controlled soft launch strategy — expanded to nationwide Whole Foods distribution by September 2024, then used that proof point to approach regional chains. It's the kind of phased distribution playbook covered in our Brand Launch Department reporting: anchor at one premium national account, build velocity data, then use that NielsenIQ ranking as the buyer deck's lead slide.
The chef-credential angle accelerates consumer trust at shelf, but it's the tehina-sourcing story and the clean ingredient deck that likely closed the institutional buyers. Operators considering their own retail licensing or white-label CPG extensions should note how Zahav Foods kept the SKU count tight through launch — one core product — before introducing flavored line extensions only after the base had demonstrated shelf turns. See also our Operator Intelligence coverage on how restaurant brands are packaging IP for retail buyers.
Takeaway for Operators
The Zahav Foods expansion illustrates how a restaurant brand with strong culinary credentialing and a defensible product story can compress the typical retail distribution timeline when it enters through a premium anchor account and builds NielsenIQ-trackable velocity before approaching regional chains.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
