How Momofuku Conquered The Grocery Aisle

The pandemic hit in March 2020, wreaking havoc on so many industries, but especially restaurants. It was a challenging time to be a CEO, let alone a new-ish one, as Marguerite Zabar Mariscal can attest. She was named CEO of Momofuku, the culinary empire founded by chef David Chang, shortly before the world shut down. At 29, she was responsible for more than 400 employees when the future of restaurants was suddenly in doubt.

Tough decisions had to be made. Momofuku closed a handful of outposts including one in Sydney, Australia, leading some to speculate the company was giving up on restaurants. (They’re not.) The way forward? Conquering the grocery aisle. Mariscal sped up plans for Momofuku Goods, a line of pantry staples like soy sauce and instant noodles, which launched in the fall of 2020 and reportedly did $1 million dollars in sales in its first week.

In hindsight, consumer goods was a no-brainer for Momofuku. According to the brand, something like ninety percent of people who follow Chang on social media don’t live in a city with a Momofuku restaurant. Now, Chang can meet his fans where they live. Or at least at their grocery store. Momofuku Goods is now available at Whole Foods and Target, with the brand doing $67.5 million dollars in revenue in 2024, exceeding the restaurant’s haul for the first time. (In late February 2025, the company recruited Padraic “Paddy” Spence—formerly of Zevia—to run CPG.)

Mariscal was perhaps the exact right person to steer Momofuku in this pivotal moment. As the great-great granddaughter of the founders of Zabar’s, the grocery institution on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, she has supermarket in her DNA. Here, the 35-year-old CEO talks about her family’s legacy, Momofuku’s future (hello, JFK airport), and what the Muppets have to do with leadership.

MICKEY RAPKIN: You started at Momofuku as an intern. At the age of 29, you were named CEO. But you originally turned down the role. What kept you from saying yes?

MARGUERITE ZABAR MARISCAL: I came to the company right after graduating. I had experience working in food, in retail, in the restaurants. But I didn’t really feel like I had the experience.

RAPKIN: What was the turning point then?

MARISCAL: If it’s not me, it’s someone else, right? I think that was maybe a turning point. If I was making decisions for the company, I can help make decisions that are the best for the people. I want to have that responsibility, I want to make an impact and make some of these big decisions—like the pivot to consumer packaged goods. But I think it took a bit of convincing for me to feel comfortable in the seat.

How Momofuku Conquered The Grocery Aisle

RAPKIN: You launched Momofuku Goods in 2020. I’m wondering if the pandemic gave you license to take a big swing like that? Restaurants were closed. Were you looking around thinking, How are we gonna keep this thing thriving?

MARISCAL: We started having meetings around products in 2019. What could that look like? How would we produce it? What should they be? I think we always really knew that restaurants needed diversification. Even before the pandemic you saw rising rents, utilities, food costs—all the things that are still very true today. That being said, the pandemic definitely expedited every plan we had, right? It lit a fire under our butts to get a product out there.

ERIC RYAN: I always love the phrase “Never waste a good crisis.” There’s few businesses that are worse to be in than a restaurant during a pandemic. Were there any other gifts that came out of that crisis for you?

MARISCAL: I think it was a good way of assessing the business as a whole, right? I think it’s very easy—as a restaurant group—to get into this flow. Hey, we’re going to keep opening restaurants, we need to go to new cities. We’re very lucky, we get offers all the time. We got offers to go to Miami, we got offers to open new things internationally, and we said no to basically everything. We took the time to say, What do we want this to look like? I would also add, we’re such a weird company in that it’s a nascent CPG company in a 20-year-old brand, right?

RAPKIN: You did $50 million dollars in 2023. It may be nascent, but it’s not small.

MARISCAL: Sure, yeah. I think we’re still finding the path forward.

Picking Your Battles

RAPKIN: How do you differentiate between a good idea and a big idea?

MARISCAL: I think we try to focus our time around, what are the big ideas that are going to change the trajectory of the business, change the trajectory of the supermarket? I think something about Momofuku and Dave Chang is, there’s no shortage of ideas. A lot of what we’re creating is not new, right? There’s a huge tradition of chili crisp, a huge tradition of instant noodles. For us, it’s really about, What is our perspective on this? We’re not really creating a category. We’re just expanding it within conventional retail that maybe hasn’t seen these things and getting it to a consumer that maybe wouldn’t have considered purchasing it before.

RYAN: With CPG, I always say the winning formula is finding that perfect intersection of novel and familiar. So, it’s familiar enough that enough of a mainstream America understands it. But novel enough that you have a point of differentiation.

RAPKIN: Since we’re talking grocery, you’re the great-great granddaughter of the founders of Zabar’s. If anyone was going to start a Momofuku grocery store, you’d have the right credentials. Have you thought about a convenience store? A grocery?

MARISCAL: Not yet. We’re really focused on these products. I would say, from someone who loves grocery stores—whenever I go to a different country, a grocery store is an incredible way to get to know a city.

RYAN: I do, too. We were in Seoul recently. We went to one of those apps to find a tour guide. This guy was incredibly confused as we hit our third grocery store.

MARISCAL: (smiling) It’s been fun to make products. And we sell the products at Zabar’s. [The grocery business] is something I grew up with. Sunday dinners with my grandfather, who in his mid-nineties is still working in the store as the vice president. He would show me P&Ls. From a very early age I was indoctrinated into all of this.

RAPKIN: But your family didn’t want you to go into the food business. Is that right?

MARISCAL: I think it’s somewhat generational in that my grandfather would always talk about how retail has horrible hours and small margins, and you work on holidays. You know, all the reasons you should never do it. My mom became a lawyer. My aunt became a doctor. It was almost this very intentional diaspora into other things. And then I would say with my generation it’s almost come full circle.

The Restaurant Game

RAPKIN: There have been big changes to the restaurant industry since Covid. Momofuku closed a handful of restaurants, though you’re about to open a new spot.

MARISCAL: We’re opening a restaurant—the first part is going to be a bar called Bar Kabawa, and then, Kabawa, a prix fixe restaurant we’re going to open in a little bit. It’s not—by any means—that we don’t believe in the future of restaurants. Restaurants are always going to be so core to us. Looking back pre-pandemic, the span of restaurants, the concepts of restaurants— We were in about five cities spread across the globe, with multiple different types of restaurants, different menus, different procurement.

RAPKIN: Lots of concepts.

MARISCAL: We have, once again, no shortage of ideas. For us, it was really about taking a step back and saying, If we were to design this, what would this look like? We would have hubs so that we could leverage talent that we have across multiple locations. Or in the same city, we would have some consistency and concepts so that we can take the learnings from one and apply it to the other. And that meant some really hard decisions. We had one restaurant in Australia, we had one restaurant in Washington, D.C. We’re really excited to open [Kabawa] with an incredible chef, Paul Carmichael, that Dave and I have both worked with for over a decade.

RAPKIN: Did you say it’s price fixed?

MARISCAL: It’s gonna be a set menu, but not a tasting menu.

RAPKIN: I was gonna say, Is “tasting menu” now a bad word? People have an idea that it’s fussy.

MARISCAL: I don’t think it’s a bad word. I think that there’s an occasion [for a tasting menu]. A big conversation going into this restaurant is, you know, What does New York City need now? I think for us trying to find a lower price point was important, trying to find an atmosphere that felt convivial and fun, but also like a special occasion. I think all of those things led us more to three or four courses as opposed to a 12-course tasting menu.

RYAN: As a consumer, I love the prix fixe. The less you have to think the better, and being in the hands of the chef. But my understanding, too, is on the economics. If you know exactly how many people are coming, exactly what you’re serving, it’s a lot more profitable because it’s a simpler menu, there’s less waste.

MARISCAL: Somewhat. I mean, food’s just tough right now in general. Food cost is constantly something we need to be monitoring. But I think from an experience standpoint, I think it’s great to have consistency. We’re talking about a restaurant that has about 24 seats in the main dining room. The ability to know what it’s gonna look like helps us plan. But if it’s done right, it’s the ability to surprise and delight, right? It’s three courses. But you know the bread course is incredible, and the butter is incredible, and maybe there’s a dessert that’s thrown in at the end. All we want to do is beat expectations, right? Something we talk about a ton at Momofuku is that value doesn’t mean cheap. Whether you’re paying $125 dollars or you’re paying ten dollars, do you walk away saying, “That was worth it.” And for us talking, working with Paul, we thought a prix fixe was kind of the best way to under-sell and over-deliver.

Working With David Chang

RAPKIN: We’ve been talking about Dave. But we haven’t actually talked about Dave. What’s the sort of yin and yang of the partnership that makes it work?

MARISCAL: I’ve worked with Dave now, at this point, over 13 years. He is incredible at predicting trends, at understanding what people want to eat. I’m more of the editor. In going back to the idea of big ideas—not good ideas—I’m making sure that his time, his attention, his brain is focused on the biggest problems that we’re trying to solve. And how do we best leverage him. He has a live show on Netflix, he obviously has a podcast, he’s commentating for the NFL. He’s everywhere. That’s very beneficial to the business, right? But I think our yin and yang is his brain and what he sees. And how we can work together on deliverables.

RYAN: I always think of really dynamic duos—often companies have an artist and an operator, an insider and an outsider, somebody who’s spending more time being the face of the brand and promoting, identifying trends, and the person who is making sure those trains run on time. You both have an artistry in you, which is probably why it works so well.

MARISCAL: Have you heard this thing about how there’s Order Muppets and Chaos Muppets?

RYAN: No, go on!

MARISCAL: I feel pretty strongly that everyone falls into one of these two buckets. There are people that are really good with uncertainty and new ideas and something that’s not fully formed. And there are people that are, like, that’s really uncomfortable. And I want to be told what I need to do. I think my role is making sure the right brains are on the right things. That’s something that’s especially true with CPG. You can have a great idea, but how does that scale up to a million units? And how does the taste change and the economics? How are you going to get it from point A to Point B? Dave’s the first person to say, “I don’t really care, that’s not fun, that’s not interesting.”

RYAN: So, what kind of Muppet are you?

MARISCAL: I think I’m an Order Muppet who gets Chaos Muppets.

RAPKIN: What’s more difficult, operating a restaurant in a Vegas casino or one in JFK airport?

MARISCAL: We’ll find out. We’re launching our first airport restaurant this year. But operating a restaurant in Vegas— I think just operating restaurants in general, in my opinion, it’s harder than CPG. CPG has its own challenges. But the thing about restaurants is, It’s all [about] people, you know? Can you make a recipe? Who’s cooking it? How busy are they? You can have the best laid plans. But at the end of the day it’s about culture, it’s about education, it’s about buy-in and managing a team of over 500 people.

RAPKIN: Do you have a favorite story from the Vegas restaurant log?

MARSICAL: (smiling) For context, every morning around 10 a.m. you get the report from last night. How many covers, what were the sales, beverage versus food, what was it like in the kitchen, what was it like in the dining room. Sometimes there’s great little things in there. This is actually not in Vegas, this is at a restaurant we had in New York. I’ll never forget, it was a holiday party for a well-known coffee chain. And the log was essentially, like, These monsters. Basically everyone was double-fisting drinks.

RAPKIN: Zabar’s is a pop culture icon. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan shot a scene there from You’ve Got Mail. Kate McKinnon mentioned it on SNL. It was referenced on The West Wing and in How I Met Your Mother.What’s your favorite pop culture moment?

MARISCAL: I mean, You’ve Got Mail is very high up there. I distinctly remember my grandpa buying probably, like, 50 VHS copies of it and handing them out to anyone he came by. Recently, Vampire Weekend adid a merch line with Zabar’s ahead of their show at Madison Square Garden. I was frantically texting the GM of Zabar’s, Save something for me, please! But I think the most interesting thing that I would say is, my mom wrote a book on the history of Zabar’s. And me and my family members would do these book talks. At the end there would be a Q&A. It was just fans of Zabar’s who had really specific questions that they had no other means to get answered. So the Q&A would be, like, “I used to buy Blue Mountain Jamaican coffee. You discontinued it this year. What’s the closest coffee I can order?” It just showed how much of a personal connection a lot of people have to the space.

RAPKIN: To bring it back to Momofuku, people have a similar reaction to the restaurants. I celebrated a job once at Ssäm Bar. I loved that restaurant. That connection is still part of your story.

MARISCAL: Totally. When I started to work for Momofuku, I did not want to work in restaurants. I was basically told, “Do not do that.” But I really believed in the brand, right? I believed in what Dave was trying to do, which, in my opinion, was using food as a way to talk about culture. Restaurants are a bad business. No one can tell you that’s not true. CPG is a slightly better business. But I truly believe it’s the connection, it’s the food, it’s the feeling. There are a lot of other industries people could be in that are way better. If you’re in it, there’s some level of care in feeding people that makes it all worth it in a lot of ways.

The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. If you liked this story on how Momofuku conquered the grocery aisle, click here for more episodes of Cereal Entrepreneur.