How Melissa's Produce built a business on explaining food
Melissa's Produce is the largest variety supplier of produce in the United States. It got there by explaining food. Thirty years before it had a recipe library, it had a website whose only purpose was telling people what jicama was, and every format since has done the same job. The 3,395 recipes it runs on Recipe Kit today are the current shape of a forty-year argument: you cannot sell food nobody recognises until you have taught somebody what to do with it.
How does Melissa's use Recipe Kit? To hold a rule the company has kept for fifteen years. Three recipes for every item it sells, across a catalogue of more than 1,700 items, each one linking back to the product it was built to explain. This teardown belongs to the Recipe Kit case study library, where we study how food brands turn recipes into a channel.
You cannot sell what nobody recognises
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 catalogue is still made of things most shoppers cannot identify: rambutan, sunchokes, black garlic, a dozen varieties of carrot.
We spoke with Robert Schueller, the company's director of public relations, who has been there thirty years, built the original website and co-wrote all seven of the company's cookbooks. He is direct about what the company is actually for.
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 compounds with the catalogue. A single familiar word hides a whole shelf: garlic at Melissa's means regular, elephant, black, peeled, jarred, chopped and minced in oil, about twelve SKUs behind one word. Each is something a shopper has to be taught to want before it can be sold.
Schueller has spent three decades on exactly that, and describes his own job in one verb.
All I do is educate. I sell to people who then take the story and then write about it.
The content came first, the store came second
This is the part most brands have backwards. Melissa's did not build an online 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.
Eventually, within a year, people started saying, well, I can't find passion fruit in my store, can I just buy it from you? It took us a few years to actually develop online sales, because our strategy as a wholesaler was to lead them to the store nearest them.
The demand arrived before the shop did, and it arrived because of the content. That sequence is the whole case for this kind of work, and Melissa's ran it accidentally, thirty years before anyone called it content marketing.
The rule: three recipes for every item
Recipes joined the information about five years in, when Melissa's hired its first corporate 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.
It is the most portable idea in this story, because it sizes a library to a catalogue rather than to a content calendar. Most content plans start from how much a team can produce, which sets the target at the wrong end. This one starts from how much the company sells. A brand with forty products needs a hundred and twenty recipes. Melissa's needs several thousand, which is why it now employs five corporate chefs and why the library is the deepest we host.
The catalogue 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. 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 closes the loop it opened. The potatoes carry a size and price selector and an add to cart, and the thyme and rosemary link out to their own pages (live, August 2026)
The recipe is written before the product can be sold
The clearest evidence that Melissa's treats content as infrastructure rather than promotion is what happens when it takes on something nobody in the country stocks. The recipe comes close to the start of the launch rather than 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.
The sequence matters. The recipe exists before the sales team is allowed to sell the item, and the tasting of that recipe is how the sales team is trained. The content is the launch itself, not something produced afterward to support it.
The reasoning is plain enough that it travels to any brand introducing anything unfamiliar.
If we're learning about it and don't know anything about it, we can't expect everybody else in the United States to know about it.
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 southeast. Then Melissa's waits, and by Schueller's account an item can take ten, twenty, even forty years to reach the mainstream.
Some of them took five, ten [years], even longer to actually develop, because we're waiting for that big push. Whether it was on the TV food network, or a commercial, or now a social media 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 organised by course rather than by season, with side dishes, entrees, beverages, desserts, soups and salads each holding their own section. Nothing in that structure expires.
What a recipe can say that a shelf cannot
Melissa's competes on the one attribute a package cannot communicate, which is why the teaching is not optional.
We are a premium product. We are a premium price, and we focus on flavor and culinary over price. Everybody else focuses on price.
A brand competing on price does not need a recipe library, because the argument fits on a label. A brand competing on flavour has no other way to make its case. A shelf cannot carry a claim about taste, so a recipe is the cheapest way to hand that claim to somebody.
Where the readers actually come from
Melissa's runs its social accounts with four people, and the operating principle is that one message does not travel across platforms.
We don't take a concept and just repeat the message on every single one. It doesn't communicate, because you've got to know who are the people that are subscribed on X, who are the people on Facebook, who are the people that do TikTok. So we have age appropriate people who post.
What that feeds is the part worth copying, because it inverts the usual assumption about where a library sits in the funnel.
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 advertisement and the library is the destination. That is why depth matters more than novelty here: whatever a reel sends somebody looking for has to already exist on the site, which is exactly what three recipes per item guarantees.
The influence runs backwards too. A format that performs on social changes what the kitchen develops next.
You take a watermelon, cut it in half, fill it up with cream. We did it with mango, we did it with the pink pineapple. Eventually every single fruit will be a make your own ice cream. Because of that, now we're developing more ice cream. That's what the kitchen is doing right now.
What they deliberately keep off the site
Melissa's has published seven cookbooks in about fifteen years. Almost none of those recipes are on the website, and that is a decision rather than an oversight.
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.
For a company giving away 3,395 recipes, holding a few hundred back is what keeps the paid product worth paying for. Free and premium content can coexist, as long as somebody decides which is which.
How Recipe Kit supports the system
Melissa's has published on Recipe Kit since September 2020 and now runs 3,395 recipes, the deepest library we host, drawing more than 48,000 views over the last ninety days. At that scale the mechanics matter more than the writing.
The shoppable recipe cards are what 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 go hunting through 1,700 items. The recipe schema underneath is part of what lets a page like the poblano pepper pasta hold the first page of Google for its dish, which is how a forty-year-old education habit keeps finding new people who have never heard of the company.
What comes next
The nearer-term work is a format that sits between a recipe and a product.
Right now what's being developed are these recipe kits. We're bundling products together to be almost like a home meal kit, but we don't do that, because we don't have the efficient scale. We still go through a third party like FedEx or UPS for delivery.
Around 80% of the catalogue is perishable and has to move overnight or second-day with cold packs, which is a real constraint on what can be shipped. A bundle built around a recipe is the version of a meal kit a perishables wholesaler can actually deliver, and it is the same instinct the company has had since 1996: give somebody the whole idea, not just the ingredient.
Lessons for grocery and specialty food brands
- Size the library to the catalogue, not the calendar. Three recipes per item is a rule anyone can copy and it produces a very different number depending on how much you sell. Forty products means a hundred and twenty recipes. Most content plans start from team capacity, which is the wrong end.
- 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. Content written before the launch is part of the launch; content written after it is just promotion.
- 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, not the other way round.
- If you compete on flavour, you have to teach. Price fits on a label. Taste does not. A recipe is the only practical way to make an argument a package cannot.
- Treat social as the advert and the library as the destination. One message per platform, written by someone who uses it, all of it pointing at pages deep enough to satisfy whatever it sent people looking for.
- Decide what stays behind the paywall. Seven cookbooks, and those recipes stayed out of the free library on purpose.
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.
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