Behind The Shelf
Why "Vanilla" Wins: Jason Burke's Playbook for Scaling Food Brands
June 24, 2026
What if the biggest mistake food brands make is assuming consumers want innovation more than great taste? In this episode of Behind the Shelf, Keren Novack sits down with Jason Burke, founder and CEO of New Primal, to explore the realities of building a food brand that survives and thrives on crowded retail shelves. Drawing from his journey of growing New Primal from a homemade jerky business into a brand carried in more than 10,000 stores, Jason shares why consumer behavior is often misunderstood and why repeat purchases matter far more than initial curiosity. The conversation dives into product development, retail strategy, consumer trust, and the economics of shelf space. Jason explains why familiar products often outperform flashy innovations, how brands should think about expansion, and why authentic credibility is difficult for legacy companies to recreate. He also reveals why taste remains the ultimate competitive advantage, regardless of trends, health claims, or marketing campaigns.
What if the biggest mistake food brands make is assuming consumers want innovation more than great taste?

In this episode of Behind the Shelf, Keren Novack sits down with Jason Burke, founder and CEO of New Primal, to explore the realities of building a food brand that survives, and thrives, on crowded retail shelves. Drawing from his journey of growing New Primal from a homemade jerky business into a brand carried in more than 10,000 stores, Jason shares why consumer behavior is often misunderstood and why repeat purchases matter far more than initial curiosity.

The conversation dives into product development, retail strategy, consumer trust, and the economics of shelf space. Jason explains why familiar products often outperform flashy innovations, how brands should think about expansion, and why authentic credibility is difficult for legacy companies to recreate. He also reveals why taste remains the ultimate competitive advantage, regardless of trends, health claims, or marketing campaigns.

What you will learn:

Jason Burke is the founder and CEO of New Primal, a leading clean-label food company whose products are sold in more than 10,000 stores nationwide. Inspired by his parents' health challenges, Jason transformed a homemade jerky recipe into an eight-figure business with multiple #1-selling product lines across jerky, kids' snacks, sauces, and seasonings. Known for challenging industry norms, he has helped prove that clean ingredients can succeed at scale while influencing legacy brands to rethink their products. Jason regularly shares insights on building category-defining consumer brands.

Episode Timeline:


Episode Resources:


Episode Highlights:
Jason explains that while consumers often claim to prioritize health benefits, certifications, and clean ingredients, their purchasing behavior tells a different story. Taste remains the single most important factor behind repeat purchases. He advises brands to build products around exceptional flavor first and use nutritional benefits as supporting proof points. New Primal succeeded by offering familiar, enjoyable flavors while improving ingredient quality, proving that authenticity and great taste create stronger loyalty than health-focused marketing alone.

Jason shares how New Primal introduced chicken meat sticks by anchoring them to the familiar taste of rotisserie chicken rather than leading with novelty. Consumers are more willing to try something new when they can connect it to a flavor they already understand and enjoy. He argues that successful innovation starts with familiarity, allowing brands to build trust and trial before expanding into more adventurous offerings. Winning the basics first creates the foundation for long-term product innovation.

Jason challenges the common belief that more retail doors automatically create growth. He argues that emerging brands should focus on dominating a smaller group of stores before expanding. Strong repeat purchases and sales velocity create a flywheel that supports profitable scaling, while weak performance across many locations often leads to costly retailer exits. Since most revenue comes from existing customers, building loyalty and performance in core markets is far more valuable than chasing rapid distribution growth.

Jason encourages brands to distinguish lasting consumer movements from temporary industry trends. He points to protein as an example of a long-term shift rooted in human nutrition rather than a recent fad. Instead of relying on trend reports or survey data, he recommends looking for behaviors connected to ancestral eating patterns, nutrient density, and real food. Brands that align with these enduring movements can create sustainable growth opportunities that last for decades rather than a few years.

Jason observes that younger consumers are already highly aware of nutrition and ingredient quality. During a visit to a high school entrepreneurship class, students instinctively examined ingredient labels and nutritional information before tasting products. He believes this signals a permanent shift in consumer expectations. For brands, transparency and clean ingredients are quickly becoming standard requirements rather than competitive advantages. Companies that establish credibility early will be better positioned than legacy brands trying to rebuild trust later.

Jason highlights the hidden financial realities of retail distribution. Emerging brands face the same slotting fees, promotional expenses, and placement costs as major food companies, despite lacking the scale and resources of major food companies. This creates pressure to prioritize carefully and avoid launching too many products too quickly. Understanding these economics helps founders make smarter decisions about retailer partnerships, product portfolios, and expansion plans while avoiding costly distribution opportunities that fail to generate sufficient sales velocity.

Quotes:
  1. "Flavor and taste are really everything. I think consumers, even if you pull them, do surveys about the badges they want on the products or the nutritional callouts or anything like that, they may be important, but taste is always paramount. The brands that really are breaking through have been doing it a long time, and they started with a very core niche consumer that they were serving before it created more mainstream broad appeal."
  2. "You can have super berry, fruity, whatever all day long. You can have peach orchard. You can do all these cute fun flavors, and they may perhaps all be incremental to the category in some way, but we like vanilla ice cream. We like vanilla yogurt. And so I think sometimes brands get a little cute in how they create new items, and they create all this, like, they're attempting to create categories or create perception around ideas that are pretty niche, or too nascent."
  3. "I think most of us just go very wide, whether that be in door count or distribution or in our assortment. We start to add new flavors and a bunch of new cute things, and we get too wide before we've really created a true highly loyal repeat audience. Narrow and deep is significantly better than being too wide and too shallow."
  4. "If you're just knocking them down and you don't have any flywheel going, it's just gonna cost you an extraordinary amount of money. You're gonna pay us money in slotting fees. Product's not gonna move off the shelf, and a year later, they're gonna cut you. And then getting that opportunity again is three or four years down the road if you're lucky."
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