How Melissa's Produce built a business on explaining food

Melissa's Produce is the largest variety supplier of produce in the United States, and it got there by explaining food. Thirty years ago, its website existed only to tell people what jicama was. Today it runs 3,410 recipes on Recipe Kit, and 92% of them were read in the last 90 days.

How does Melissa's use Recipe Kit? To keep a rule the company has followed for fifteen years: three recipes for every item it sells. Across more than 1,700 items, each recipe links back to the product it was written to explain.

You cannot sell what nobody recognizes

Melissa's was founded in 1984 by Joe and Sharon Hernandez, and named for their daughter. Joe had grown up in El Paso eating ingredients that Los Angeles supermarkets did not stock, and the company was built to fix that. Four decades on, the catalog is still made of things most shoppers cannot identify: rambutan, sunflower chokes, black garlic, a dozen varieties of carrot.

Robert Schueller is the company's director of public relations. He has been there thirty years, built the original website and co-wrote all seven of its cookbooks.

Our lifeblood is introducing new fruits and vegetables and value added products into the United States for the first time. That is what we're most known for.

That is a teaching problem before it is a selling problem, and it grows with the catalog. One familiar word can hide a whole shelf: garlic at Melissa's means regular, elephant, black, peeled, jarred, chopped and minced in oil, about twelve products in all. Each one has to be explained before it can be sold.

The content came first, the store came second

Melissa's did not build a store and then add content to fill it. It published information for years with nothing to sell.

When we first started off at Melissas.com, all we wanted to do is give out information. At that time, thirty years ago, the internet was newer, and you wouldn't be a company if you didn't have a website. So we just started putting information up, because people didn't know what jicama was, or passion fruit, or this or that. At the time we were a company that had about 600 items.

The pages carried what a confused shopper actually needs: every name an item goes by, how to store it, how to tell when it is ripe, what to do with it. Melissa's was a wholesaler, so the strategy was to send readers to a shop. The readers had other ideas. Within a year, people who could not find passion fruit in their local store were asking to buy it direct. Online sales took a few more years to build, because a wholesaler's habit is to point people to the nearest store.

The demand arrived before the shop did, and it arrived because of the content. Melissa's was doing content marketing thirty years before anyone used the term.

The rule: three recipes for every item

Recipes joined the information about five years in, when Melissa's hired its first chef whose entire job was creating them. For the first several years there were no photographs. What turned a scattering of recipes into a library was a target set roughly fifteen years ago and never dropped.

We had a goal of putting up three recipes for every item on our website. And that has always been the goal.

The rule sizes the library to the catalog, not to a content calendar. Most content plans start from how much a team can produce. This one starts from how much the company sells. A brand with forty products needs a hundred and twenty recipes. Melissa's needs thousands, which is why it now has five chefs on staff.

The depth gets used. In the last 90 days, readers opened almost every recipe in the library at least once.

The catalog does not sit still either. Melissa's introduces fifteen to twenty new items a year, a handful of which have never been sold in the country before, and every one of them arrives owing three recipes. A jicama has grilled jicama and a jicama salad; sunflower chokes have a soup and a salad. Best sellers earn more: Dutch Yellow Potatoes, the number one item, has more than fifty on the site and once had an entire book to itself.

Every recipe links back to what it sells. The potatoes carry a size and price selector and an add to cart, and the thyme and rosemary link to their own pages

The recipe comes before the sale

When Melissa's takes on something nobody in the country stocks, the recipe comes at the start of the launch, not the end.

The first thing we do is get information. We send some to the chefs. They start creating recipes, maybe one or two. We taste it. We understand it. We educate the salespeople about this product.

Not just the product and the price, but the whole story around it. So the chef does a tasting of the recipe that's probably going to be on the website, so all of our sales team knows what it tastes like.

So the recipe exists before the sales team sells the item, and tasting it is how the team learns the product.

From there the item goes into a small group of culinary retailers to be watched, Bristol Farms and Gelson's on the west coast, Wegmans on the east, Central Market in the southwest. Then Melissa's waits. An item can take ten, twenty, even forty years to reach the mainstream, usually after one big push: a Food Network segment, a commercial, or now a reel that goes viral.

A library that has to stay useful for twenty years is built differently from a campaign. It is one reason the recipes are organized by course rather than by season, with side dishes, entrees, beverages, desserts, soups and salads each in its own section. Nothing in that structure expires, and the traffic shows it: 78% of recipe views in the last 90 days went to recipes published more than three years ago.

What a recipe can say that a shelf cannot

Melissa's competes on the one thing a package cannot show. Its products carry a premium price on purpose, because the company sells on flavor while most of the market sells on price.

A price fits on a label. Flavor does not. A recipe is the cheapest way to show someone what a premium product tastes like.

Where the readers come from

Four people run Melissa's social accounts, and they never post the same message everywhere. The audience on X is not the audience on Facebook or TikTok, so each platform gets posts from someone close in age to the people who follow it.

All of it points back to the website.

People don't go to websites necessarily unless they want to look at a product catalog. People do social media and then get sucked into the website.

Social is the ad, and the library is where people land. Whatever a reel sends someone looking for has to be on the site already, and three recipes per item makes sure it is.

It works the other way too. A format that does well on social changes what the kitchen cooks next. One recent hit was homemade ice cream: halve a fruit, fill it with cream and freeze it. Melissa's has done it with mango and pink pineapple, and the kitchen is now developing more ice cream recipes because of it.

What stays off the site

Melissa's has published seven cookbooks in about fifteen years. Almost none of those recipes are on the website, on purpose.

We have no competitive advantage if we create a cookbook of recipes from our cookbook. There's no point. So all of our cookbook recipes were never put online. I put maybe a dozen or so, to keep that competitive advantage.

Melissa's gives away thousands of recipes and holds a few hundred back, so the books stay worth buying.

How Recipe Kit supports the system

Melissa's has published on Recipe Kit since September 2020 and now runs 3,410 recipes. Between January 2025 and September 2026 they drew more than 350,000 views, steady at around 17,000 a month.

The shoppable recipe cards turn a teaching page into a buying one: the hero ingredient sits in the ingredient list as a linked product with size and price options, so a reader does not have to search 1,700 items. The recipe schema underneath helps a page like the poblano pepper pasta rank on the first page of Google for its dish. That is how a forty-year-old habit of explaining food keeps reaching people who have never heard of the company.

Lessons for grocery and specialty food brands

• Size the library to the catalog, not the calendar. Three recipes per item is a rule anyone can copy. Forty products means a hundred and twenty recipes.
• Write the recipe before the product launches. At Melissa's the chef's tasting of that recipe is how the sales team learns the item.
• Publish before you have anything to sell. Melissa's ran an information site for years as a wholesaler, and customers asked to buy direct. Demand followed the teaching.
• If you compete on flavor, you have to teach. Price fits on a label. Taste does not.
• Treat social as the ad and the library as the destination. Write one message per platform, and point all of it at pages deep enough to answer what people came looking for.
• Keep some recipes for the books. Melissa's keeps its cookbook recipes off the free site, so the books stay worth buying.

More fresh-food stories from the case study library: how iRASSHAi turned recipes into its primary SEO channel, inside Burlap & Barrel's six-year library, and Olivelle's recipe conversion discipline. If you are working out how to get more from a library you already have, we wrote up ways to repurpose recipe content for more traffic.