Inside Mason Dixie’s Portfolio Strategy

Mason Dixie is expanding into new dayparts as it builds across channels in over 8,500 doors.

The frozen biscuit sandwich maker is introducing handheld breakfast burritos and, in a first outside the breakfast set, two chicken sandwiches, including Spicy Chicken on its signature biscuit and Crispy Chicken on a potato roll. The new items were teased at Natural Products Expo West in March.

“We’ve known for quite some time that there’s been a gap in the market for a real chicken sandwich option in frozen,” founder Ayeshah Abuelhiga told Nosh recently. “Everybody gets their chicken sandwich from QSR (quick-serve restaurants), which is crazy to me because it’s one of the most ordered handhelds outside of a burger.”

The frozen chicken sandwiches launched exclusively at Whole Foods Market this month and will be available for national distribution in August. The brand has been waiting to launch this innovation since its earliest days, moving from a foodservice concept to a challenger brand in grocery store freezers.

“When we had our restaurant, our number one selling item was our fried chicken sandwich, which was our number one seller starting at 7 a.m.,” Abuelhiga said. “It’s synonymous with our brand heritage, and we’ve been working on it for quite some time.”

The reason Mason Dixie hasn’t hit shelves sooner with its chicken sandwich innovation came down to a lack of scale in the brand’s early years. It needed to be confident it could hit minimum-order quantities (MOQs) while still maintaining the clean-label quality standards the brand had established for itself.

Then, in a post-COVID landscape, chicken has become an increasingly challenging commodity to source because poultry is “notoriously under-supplied and over-demanded,” she said.

“To develop the relationship we have with our poultry supplier, we had to be able to guarantee that we can move that volume for a proprietary blend line.”

Along with the new sandwiches, Mason Dixie has launched a 4-SKU line of breakfast burritos: Carnivore, Chorizo, Sausage, and Egg and Cheese.

Abuelhiga believes the burritos are incremental to what Mason Dixie has already established in the freezer aisle.

“The reality is frozen [buying] behavior is still very nuanced and limited to what is their repeat purchase,” Abuelhiga said. “Burritos have been the number one most requested platform outside of a [chicken] sandwich.”

The burritos have rolled out with retail partners in the Mid-Atlantic like Giant Foods, as well as part of a 10-SKU set Wegmans has taken on chainwide.

“In most Wegmans store layouts produce abuts frozen, so you’re taking that organic shopper into a massively conventional set and potentially turning away those dollars,” she said. “I think [Wegmans was] looking at the breakfast set in particular as an opportunity to renovate.”

Although Mason Dixie still considers itself a natural channel brand, it has built its retail footprint to provide an assortment for that consumer demographic in club, conventional and mass stores, offering incrementality to retail buyers in value-driven channels as a more premium product.

According to internal tracking, Mason Dixie claims it adds “122% more spend into the frozen category and 120% across the store, if Mason Dixie is purchased,” Abuelhiga said.

Premium products expand margins for retailers because there is margin compression with carrying only value-priced items.

“You have to sell a lot more to make up for the dollars,” she said. “You have to think about where am I going to gain margin? Fifty percent of $5 is a lot more than 50% of $2.”