How Mason Dixie Foods’ CEO is forcing a rethink of the frozen aisle

When Ayesha Abuelhiga started Mason Dixie Foods in 2012, her mission was clear: cleaning up the quick service restaurant space.

Standing on its tagline of “clean, convenient, comfort food,” the restaurant-turned-retail-brand began in a food desert in the Washington D.C. area, where customers waited in two hour long lines during the first few days of opening.

“People were encouraged by the fact that we knew what was going into our food,” said Abuelhiga in an interview with Food Dive.

A first generation American, Abuelhiga is Korean and Palestinian Israeli. Her parents were also in the restaurant business and served quality comfort food at their small convenience store.

Abuelhiga craved that same kind of food — the kind that warms the soul — once she moved out. But the closest she could find was fast food. So she decided to make it herself.

“I wanted to clean up what was happening in QSR. No one was touching good ol’ American comfort food and it is still the most industrialized food we had,” she said in a panel at Expo West.

Abuelhiga gave up her corporate job to open Mason Dixie, and it wasn’t long until the joint had long lines and was selling out products daily.

Despite receiving some moral shunning for still serving deep fried chicken and flaky biscuits with the mission of “cleaning up” the space, Abuelhiga stood by her goal of creating real food with real ingredients, like antibiotic-free chicken, whole eggs and real butter.

The entrepreneur said Mason Dixie Foods really started making waves when it launched into the frozen breakfast space in 2021. The company is now a category leader in breakfast sandwiches, and recently launched five skews into Whole Foods nationwide, with plans for an expanded retail launch this spring.

Lessons learned

Through Abuelhiga’s journey into retail, she gained insight on some unfortunate realities of the natural and organic food space. Ones that she is trying to change.

“The ingredients in food items that should be handmade are very scary,” she said. 

Abuelhiga believes that many products in the natural and organic food space are hiding under the guise of optionality and social and environmental equality in products, but at the cost of human nutrition.

“Natural and organic has become synonymous with ‘free-from’ foods, free-from gluten, dairy, paleo, keto, vegan friendly, et cetera,” Abuelhiga said. Instead of the origination of what these diets stood for, the industry is replacing or hiding certain ingredients for the sake of labeling a product with certifications, she said.

Eighty four percent of Americans buy “free from” foods because they want less processed options, according to data from Mintel, but a lot of these products may be more processed with ingredients like modified cellulose, and other stabilizers and emulsifiers.

“In the quest to create free form options we forget that we also want minimally processed,” Abuelhiga said. “Consumers are not stupid, and it’s our job as food producers to deliver a product that moves the industry in the right direction.” 

Nature’s preservative

“Scratch made with real butter,” as it reads on the brand’s packaging, Mason Dixie Foods carries frozen breakfast sandwich products like a sausage, egg and cheese biscuit, croissant sandwich with savory sausage egg and cheese, a pancake sandwich with sweet maple sausage, an english muffin sausage with canadian bacon and more. The brand also has a baked goods line featuring frozen waffles and biscuits.

After being in the frozen food space for eight years, Abuelhiga describes the freezer as being “nature’s preservative,” but acknowledged how it is a very expensive way to get natural food, or anything for that matter, out to consumers.

“Retailers have to have freezers occupied and running all the time, and then there’s the supply chain side, you have to deal with spoilage rates when trucks go down, and they’re running more fuel to keep frozen foods in trucks,” she said. “It’s just a heavier operational burden.” 

Because of that, CPG companies have cut corners and started introducing more preservatives, fillers and other chapter ingredients in an effort to reduce costs and improve profitability, according to Abuelhiga.

“One of the things that really inspired me to pursue making natural food natural again was that as I discovered that in the process of working with frozen food manufacturers, I learned they’re more concerned about the health and safety of their machines than they are the people that they serve.”

Whether it’s using palm oil over animal product processing agents, or using binders and bonding agents that help emulsify doughs to move them through the manufacturing process easier, or adding silicon dioxide to get them to crumble easier, “all of these things are unnecessary for the human digestive tract,” Abuelhiga said.