In the rarefied world of cheese in small batches, the closest a product can get to widespread fame is Tom Colicchio yell for your favorite flower bark in “Top Chef”.
That’s why Anne Saxelby, the founder and co-owner of Saxelby Cheesemongers in New York City, was so surprised when a supplier told her that a recipe on the popular video app TikTok had generated such a huge demand for feta cheese that she he didn’t want to get his weekly cheese shipment.
Mrs. Saxelby and her feta maker – Narragansett Creamery, a small Rhode Island dairy – were swept up in the video recipe phenomenon known as baked feta dough. It is an extremely easy and extremely creamy oven-baked pasta sauce made with a whole block of feta cheese nestled in half a liter of cherry tomatoes, with olive oil, pepper and garlic.
The recipe caught fire for the first time in Finland in 2018, after food blogger Jenni Hayrinen made uunifetapasta, Finnish oven-baked feta pasta. (It was a simplified version of a dish called Prosecco spaghetti and tomato, made by Tiiu Piret, another Finnish culinary blogger.)
But it didn’t really take off in the United States until it started to accumulate ecstatic fans at TikTok in early January. Videos are just as likely to be made by influencers as they are by teenagers without many followers. Now #fetapasta has over 600 million views, not to mention the repercussions on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and followers of Rachael Ray, the “Today” and “Good Morning America” program.
[Melissa Clark’s first TikTok video was her one-pan version of the #fetapasta]
In mid-February – when feta was the No. 1 search term in the Instacart grocery delivery app – the Charlotte Observer reported temporarily empty feta shelves at local stores, such as Harris Teeter supermarkets. Demand grew 200 percent, said Danna Robinson, a spokeswoman for the company, which operates more than 230 stores in seven states.
Narragansett Creamery, which supplies Saxelby Cheesemongers and markets like Zabar’s and Eataly with its Salty Sea Feta, is now expanding weekly production from 6,000 to 10,000 pounds a week, said Mark Federico Jr., who runs the company with his parents. (That higher number is how much they used to produce at the height of the summer salad season, before sales to restaurants were destroyed by the pandemic.)
Kroger was also caught off guard, said Walshe Birney, who oversees the specialty cheese counters at the national supermarket chain, which owns Murray’s Cheese. Sales of feta blocks, which are more creamy than crumbles, have increased.
“This is the biggest and most widespread geographic increase in interest and sales in a product that I have seen in person,” wrote Birney by email.
Although there is no shortage of feta cheese at Krinos Foods, the largest importer and manufacturer of Greek and Mediterranean food products in the country, sales have been stronger than normal for months. Eric Moscahlaidis, the company’s president, said that Krinos managed to persuade some Walmarts and Costcos to make experimental sales of real Greek feta cheese, in addition to the versions of cow’s milk they already stocked. (In Europe, feta is a product with a protected name that must be made in certain regions of Greece with goat’s milk and local sheep.)
But feta is not the only food to receive a boost from the real world of TikTok. And it probably won’t be the last, given the rapidly growing status of TikTok recipes, like baked oat cake and do-it-yourself vegan chicken.
Mrs. Saxelby sold another cheese, Winnimere, after a TikTok video of a friend praising the cheese had over 250,000 views in two days. It sold 20 whole rounds in one day – 12 sold in a typical week – and the Vermont dairy that makes it, Jasper Hill Farm, has seen a significant increase in traffic to its website.
After months of another popular TikTok recipe known as a tortilla wrap hack – you cut, fill and fold a large flour tortilla to make a giant slice of a sandwich – Olé Mexican Foods in Georgia saw an increase in sales of its size of burrito across the country Tortas. The biggest growth occurred in cities that are not “traditional tortilla markets,” said Enrique Botello, the company’s marketing manager.
Last spring, Target stores across the country ran out of packets of Martinelli apple juice, when millions of TikTokers – including singer Lizzo – realized that when you bite into an apple-shaped plastic bottle, it sounds like you’re crushing it. the real fruit.
The 153-year-old Californian company had to increase production to keep up, said Tom Brancky, a marketing consultant, who gave a weekly PowerPoint presentation last May to keep the company up to date on all the video’s successes. It is still shipping once a month.
“It was phenomenal, it was unreal,” he said, “and it was mostly schoolchildren who ran it.”