More than 50 Union Kitchen Accelerator brands have successfully onboarded with Giant Food, one of the Mid-Atlantic’s largest and most influential grocery retailers.
Behind these wins is a proven approach: grow locally, own your production, and scale in phases. Among the brands now sold in Giant Food stores are several standouts from Union Kitchen’s Accelerator:
Compass Coffee, founded by Michael Haft
MasPanadas, founded by Margarita Womack
Snacklins, founded by Samy Kobrosly
Myles' Comfort Food, founded by Myles Powell
Susosu Water, founded by Jheen Oh and Nadia Lizarazu
Each of these founders worked closely with the Union Kitchen team to develop a strong foundation—refining their mission, brand strategy, and product formulation before bringing a market-ready product to store shelves and supercharging their path to product market fit.
Union Kitchen built a direct relationship with the buying team at Giant Food. The goal was straightforward: create a pipeline that would give local, early-stage food businesses the opportunity to grow into larger retail environments—without skipping critical steps.
First, brands within the Union Kitchen Accelerator were invited to pitch their products to the team at Giant Foods. If successful, the products were launched on Giant's e-commerce platform to understand if this is something their customers want.
As the online pilot progressed, the results spoke for themselves. Brands that showed strong sales and consistent demand were added to physical store shelves. Today, more than 50 Union Kitchen brands have onboarded with Giant Food, turning what began as a pilot program into a steady, scalable pipeline.
Among those brands are some of the region’s most recognizable emerging names: Compass Coffee, which has grown from a single D.C. café into a multi-location operation with its own roasting and bottling facility; Maspanadas, which began as a local empanada company and is now expanded nationwide; Snacklins, the plant-based chip that went from test kitchen to national distribution
What connects these brands isn’t just where they started—it’s how they grew. They didn’t jump from concept to national launch. They followed a clear, disciplined path: start locally, manufacture in-house, iterate based on feedback, and expand through proven demand. And they took full advantage of the infrastructure Union Kitchen has spent the last decade building: kitchen space, distribution, retail channels, and most importantly, relationships that open doors.
The story of Union Kitchen and Giant Food isn’t about landing one-off placements. It’s about building a repeatable system that helps food founders scale intentionally—and do so with the support of a community that knows the road ahead.
Learn more about how Union Kitchen helps food businesses grow from local to $1m+ in sales → Explore the Accelerator