How a Challenger CPG Brand Earns Trial at Costco & Target

Meet Maazah: From Farmers Market Chutney to National Retail

Why Cart Culture Focuses on In-Store Behavior

Emily Steele: Cart Culture focuses on the forces that drive cart behavior in store. There are plenty of conversations about D2C and ecommerce, but 83% of all purchases still happen in store, and that's especially true in grocery. Today, Maazah cofounders Yasameen and Sheilla Sajady share how they drive awareness, trial, and sales at Sprouts, Costco, and Target.

Emily: At Hummingbirds, we connect CPG brands with everyday creators, people with smaller followings whose audiences know, like, and trust them, to create impact on shelf at retailers like Sprouts, Target, and Whole Foods. We work with hundreds of CPG brands and about 80,000 creators across 80-plus cities.

Emily: Getting on shelf is a huge project, but once you're on, what does it take to stay there and gain velocity? Maazah is a challenger brand in a really established aisle, going up against some big players, so we're digging into their national launch at Sprouts, their Costco rotations, and their Target launch.

From 25 Jars to a Real Business

Sheilla Sajady: Maazah makes a line of refrigerated sauces and dips inspired by our mom's recipes. Our parents are both from Afghanistan, and food was how we connected with our culture. We started at the farmers market with our mom's chutney. My sister and I would make it fresh every Friday, 25 little jars at a time, and sell it at our stand every Saturday morning.

Yasameen Sajady: After a few years, we moved into a commercial kitchen, and every production became the biggest one yet. Eventually we had a four-foot-by-four-foot cooler that stayed at the farmers market because it was always full of product. That's when we knew this was a real thing. We're in the Midwest, where chutney was new to a lot of people, so the farmers market became our social proof and testing ground, and learning how people used it in their everyday lives was really powerful.

The Unlock: “It's That Easy?”

Yasameen: People thought they needed to buy something extra to use it at home. Once we told them they could just open it and squeeze it onto eggs, lunch, or anything at a dinner party, the reaction was, “Oh, it's that easy?”

Earning Trial When Shoppers Have Never Tried Your Category

Trial Is the Unlock

Sheilla: Trial has worked for us since the early days. When most people try it, they buy it. When we launched nationally at Whole Foods, sampling was a big part of how we showed up in store. Taste is what we stand for, and once you get it from dips to lips, people get it as soon as they try it.

Start Focused, Then Expand

Sheilla: Whole Foods was our first national retailer, and you can't be everywhere all the time. What helped was narrowing in on the regions where we could make the biggest impact. We built a Midwest sampling crew in our home base first, then looked at where Whole Foods stores were concentrated, like the Bay Area and the East Coast, and identified the key stores there.

Yasameen: There is no playbook. Everybody is different, and sampling might not even work for your brand, but for us it does.

Yasameen: Whole Foods was also our first time having access to any type of scan data, so we refined the plan based on where shoppers were already finding us and where to spend our demo dollars.

Keep Marketing Dollars Close to the Product

Sheilla: One of the best pieces of advice we got was to keep your marketing dollars as close to the product as possible in the early days, which means focusing on promotions and trial. We didn't have the budget to spray and pray across every Whole Foods store, so we were strategic about building our sampling programs.

Yasameen: Sampling is testing and learning, so make it cheaper wherever you can, whether that's doing it yourself or partnering with another brand. You really have to learn it and do it yourself first before you hire and train a team, so you don't overspend on a single tactic.

Sheilla: Brand partners are really critical. We partner with a lot of cracker brands, which helps on cost and lets us learn how others approach similar problems. You make the dollar work harder for you and build the basket, and both retailers and shoppers love it.

When In-Store Promotions Are Worth It

Yasameen: That first year at Whole Foods was our mini CPG MBA. We knew we needed promotions around moments like January better-for-you, the Super Bowl, and summer grilling, so we tested how deep to go and what resonated until we found the sweet spot for the sauces and the dips. Analyzing that data is much easier now. A small investment in a tool like Confido, or downloading your data and putting it into Claude or ChatGPT, gives you more confidence to try something different.

Sheilla: There's definitely an art to your promotions. If you run them back to back, people will only buy you on sale, and each retailer has its own requirements for how often you promote. Promotions matter early so people pick you up and try you, but you don't want to be the brand that's always on discount, because you can't work backward from that.

Every Touchpoint Counts: Shelf Presence, Storytelling & Creators

Shelf Presence and Storytelling

Yasameen: Our farmers market packaging is completely different from where we are now, and the Whole Foods launch was our grown-up test. Finishing the rebrand gave us a big step forward in showing who we are on shelf. Storytelling matters too. We hear from people who heard us on a podcast or in an interview and then saw us in store. There's a little bit of art and science that drives that trial.

Emily: The marketing rule of thumb is that it takes about 12 touchpoints, from a podcast to Cart Culture to Instacart, before someone spots Maazah at Whole Foods and grabs it.

Creators Show Shoppers Where to Find It

Sheilla: Creators are another lever, especially with Hummingbirds, because you can be super targeted when a retailer launch isn't nationwide, and you can reach communities you're not already in. For our latest Target launch, we layered creator marketing with UGC creators on top of other tactics. They walked into Target and filmed exactly where the product is on shelf, which matters because we want to show people where to buy it. They also showed how they use Maazah in their everyday lives. We can come up with eight ideas for how to use it, but a real person in a real setting is far more valuable.

Sprouts, Costco & Target: Every Retailer Needs Its Own Playbook

They're Not All Created Equal

Sheilla: One thing we learned is that they're all different, so you have to understand the consumer at each store. Costco was focused on value and proving out velocity in a limited time window, with shoppers who are meal prepping, hosting, or buying bigger sizes. Whole Foods and Sprouts shoppers are looking to add something new to the rotisserie chicken they pick up every day. Target is the newest for us, but the discovery culture within Target is real. You go in for a sweater and come out with some dip.

Learn One Retailer Before the Next

Yasameen: That first year at Whole Foods, we took the training wheels off and tested different levers in market, like putting paid search behind words such as “chicken” or “cilantro” to see what we could learn. Take it slow in the beginning and truly understand how one retailer works, especially if you're new to CPG. As you add retailers, learn what drives their customers and which programs each one is strong in. Some do really well with BOGO.

The Through Line Across Shoppers

Sheilla: The shoppers are different, from price-sensitive coupon clippers to Whole Foods shoppers who just throw it in their cart. The through line is what we offer: people want versatility and global flavors that feel approachable and easy to add to their everyday lives.

Yasameen: Discovery is different at each retailer too. The way a Target shopper finds us is different from how a Whole Foods shopper finds us, and there's always more to learn there.

Building a Brand and a Business With Intention

A Brand That Feels Like Family

Sheilla: I'm the creative brain in this relationship. I worked at Target for 13 years building their private label brands in fashion and home. For our national Whole Foods launch, we wanted packaging that felt like our family and heritage, but modern, fresh, and bold, just like the flavors in the bottle. When you see it on shelf, it doesn't look like anything else. Our logo is my sister and me, and the recipes are our mom's, so there are many layers to the story.

Sheilla: The packaging tells the family-recipe story, social shows the human side of growing a business with your sister, and trade shows and merch bring it to life in person. Everything should feel like it's coming from a similar place, whether you find us online, in a store, or at a trade show.

Yasameen: It has to authentically be you. Maazah is a love letter to our family and our parents. During the redesign, we asked ourselves what we are beyond dips and sauces, and what we want to be in five years or 50 years.

Lean Team, Always Learning

Yasameen: It's us, with great fractional partners on the finance and operations side. We're lean and mean. Two years ago, we decided what each of us would own and what we would outsource, so we could keep focusing on what makes Maazah special while still getting the work of the business done.

Yasameen: I have done just about every accelerator offered in CPG to find the next unlock, and sometimes you outgrow mentors and advisors and need new ones for the next stage of the business.

Sheilla: People think they have to have it all figured out in the beginning, but you're really just learning and evolving. When you think you have it figured out is when you're in trouble.

From the Live Q&A: Promo Tools, Brokers & Slotting

Yasameen: We use Confido to track promotions and performance, and Muffin to aggregate our data. If you can get your hands on the actual data, even in a spreadsheet, you can use AI on your own and see what you learn before paying for tools.

Yasameen: Brokers and slotting are necessary evils. Read your contracts, make sure you have a good exit plan, and start small with regional brokers until you figure out what's next.

Sheilla: We're still our own salespeople for the most part, so the timing of a broker depends on your goals and whether you need a retail-specific or natural-channel partner. You are your best salesperson. No one knows your brand as well as you do.

Yasameen: Category knowledge, like which promotions Fresh Thyme wants in your category, is easier to find now through a quick search or a half-hour session with an advisor, so you can get pretty far before hiring someone.

Scrappy Means Intentional

Emily: Maazah has grown methodically, from the farmers market to accelerators to one retailer and then the next. If Maazah is meant to be a household staple for life, what's the rush to get so big so fast?

Sheilla: We're small, and we've learned we can't say yes to everything. We ask whether an opportunity will move the business forward and whether we have the resources in place to execute it. We want to be a big brand, but it takes time, and we want to get there in a way that's responsible.

Yasameen: We also take calculated risks. Sometimes you go after the retailer you shouldn't be in yet, because it forces you to find your dream co-packer.

Winning at Costco, Retail Media & What's Next

Retail Media for Discovery

Sheilla: Retail media has been a big lever for finding new customers online, because people search online before they ever find you on the shelf. For certain retailers, we invest in it to stand out from a sea of dips and sauces.

Showing Up Big at Costco

Yasameen: Succeeding at Costco means your operations and supply chain can handle the inventory build, and your brand can show up for two kinds of shoppers: weekly loyalists and once-a-month shoppers racing through. That relationship was a test of whether we would do what we said we were going to do.

Sheilla: If shoppers see you at Costco as one of five dips and then see you again at Whole Foods or Target, that's a great brand awareness tool.

Emily: That's the halo effect. Seeing a brand in multiple places signals that it's legit.

Earning Another Rotation

Yasameen: Ultimately it's driven by your data. Costco has tiers by category for how much you need to sell and how quickly customers come back. You also have to build trust with the retailer and the buyer. If they want it in six weeks and you can't do it in eight, tell them nine. The stakes are too high to say you'll just figure it out.

Sheilla: Costco requires its own packaging and trays, so we got it as far as we possibly could before the official yes. Once it's a yes, the clock is ticking. We've also heard that Costco can tell within the first week or two whether an item will succeed in their stores.

Influencers for Costco, and an Organic Surprise at Target

Sheilla: Our budgets are minimal, but we did a few Costco-specific retailer influencers, because there's a big community on social media that watches what people buy at Costco, and those influencers already have that audience built in. It's been powerful for spreading the word that Maazah is at Costco.

Sheilla: At Target, it happened organically. Bobby Parrish, a food influencer with millions of followers who tells people what to buy at Target and other grocery stores, found Maazah on the shelf and talked about it, and we did not pay for that.

Costco's Expectations

Yasameen: It depends on your buyer and their expectations, and a broker can help you gauge where you need to be. For smaller emerging brands, they'll typically tell you afterward. They just want to see where you land on the board.

Final Words of Wisdom

Sheilla: Think holistically about how you show up, from the shelf to your website to events. Don't think you need to be good at everything. Find people who are smarter than you, and lean on other founders going through the same thing.

Yasameen: If you're a solo founder, take one part of the business at a time. It did not happen overnight. For about a year and a half, our focus was manufacturing and supply chain, making it as close to mom's recipe as possible. You have to prioritize the different needs of the business to be ready for the retail plan ahead of you.

Creator Highlights & What's Next on Cart Culture

Emily: What Sheilla said captures what we're trying to do at Hummingbirds: get real people trying and sharing your product in their own words. That's the power of creators, because they're people.