LOS ANGELES — Ayoh Foods has taken mayonnaise and pushed it to its limits with new formulations, textures and flavors, said Molly Baz, founder of Ayoh Foods. Baz, who has been in the culinary industry as a recipe developer, food personality and a cookbook author, has a “genuine love of sandwiches,” which led her to launch the business in November.

“I’m obsessed with sandwiches,” she said. “I saw a white space in the market where as a chef at home, I’m having to add all this stuff to my mayonnaise to make it really taste good. I can deliver that to someone who’s never going to do it.”

Baz has been “bored” with the mayonnaise aisle at retailers, creating a “light bulb” moment for her to pursue a different approach for updating mayonnaise.

The company offers such flavors as dill pickle, hot giardinayo, tangy dijonayo and original.

Hot giardinayo, which was the brainchild flavor for Ayoh Foods, is for those who enjoy spicy foods. Dijonayo is for consumers who like a more classic French-style sandwich flavor, and dill pickle was formulated to capitalize on the pickle craze, Baz said.

“If you go down the potato chip aisle it’s just like buck wild,” she said. “In the potato chip aisle everything has been distilled into a potato chip flavor. Why can’t we do that to mayo?”

Ayoh Foods flavors and ingredients came about, Baz said, from ingredients she reaches for on a daily basis in her own kitchen.

“I love classic mayo,” she said. “Of course there’s a million uses for it and I will continue to stock classic mayo. The first primary use case for Ayoh was sandwiches. I sort of thought about the different categories of sandwiches that people are eating and making at home and wanted to make sure there was something for everyone in our lineup.”

Finding the right contract manufacturing partner was a challenge for the company.

“I’m working on a really small scale of really high quality ingredients,” she said. “We took those recipes I developed and commercialized them. It was really important to me that we not lose any of the quality of taste. It is one thing to be able to get high quality dill pickle, chop it up and stir it in the really nice mayonnaise at home. It’s another thing to produce it at scale. That was another big challenge for us. We spent a lot of time iterating on flavors and we did rounds and rounds of tastings in order to get them to a place where I would sign off and we would scale them up.”

When asked how the company would scale against larger condiment companies like Kraft Heinz, for example, David McCormick, co-founder and chief executive officer of Ayoh Foods, said it is a bit too early to be worrying too much about the likes of Kraft Heinz.

“We are really just focused on consumers that are looking for something more exciting, fun to cook with and experiment with in the kitchen,” McCormick said. “We’re just going to focus on that, building momentum, connecting with consumers looking for something fresh and new and see where that takes us.

“There’s a world where Kraft Heinz and Ayoh exist symbiotically. We solve a much different problem, which is (where) so much of the market is focused on (is) how do we come and run this big market opportunity versus solving real customer problems.”

To help the company go-to-market and commercialize its product, Ayoh Foods participated in a pre-seed funding round last summer. In an interview with Food Entrepreneur, the founders did not want to disclose the amount of funds raised.

Molly Baz, founder of Ayoh Foods. 

| Photo: PEDEN + MUNK

For sandwich and mayonnaise lovers, consumers may purchase the product on the company’s website and Shopify store. The company has plans to expand its mayonnaise line into retail stores soon, McCormick said.

“We want to go into traditional grocery, club and the likes along with other online digital enabled shopping modes like Instacart, Hungryroots of the world,” he said. “Our go-to-market strategy ultimately right now is let’s get people making great sandwiches, sell to them direct-to-consumer (and) over the coming months take an omnichannel strategy, get offline and get into traditional retail and experiment a touch with foodservice.”

Startups all have a different approach to scale but for Baz, staying as intimately involved with future product development as possible is key for Ayoh Foods’ success, she said.

“Even if we go absolutely bonkers and we start seeing Ayoh everywhere (and) we start rolling out new flavors; for me, the biggest priority is that we never become a brand that … grew too fast and they sold out and now that mayonnaise kind of sucks,” she said. “The dream for me in 50 years is my children’s children have a heritage brand that’s part of their family that’s been quality taste and flavor ever since.”

While other condiments may be in the pipeline for Ayoh Foods, the company is focusing on a few and not trying to be everything to everyone all at once, Baz said.

“I think that’s where quality starts,” she said. “The world knew me as the Caesar salad girl before they knew me as a sandwich girl. But of course I have dreams of creating a line of dressings as well or being able to own the Caesar salad dressings space. But not until we have a handle on the space we have already carved out for ourselves.” 

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