Imagine a romantic comedy starring a guy who loves eating clean and a woman who can’t shake the brands she grew up with even though she knows they’re bad for her. Maybe we cast Glen Powell as the male lead, and he wins the heart of his leading lady when he helps create a better-for-you line of condiments where she gets everything she loves, now without GMOs, corn syrup, and other artificial ingredients.
Hollywood may not buy my movie pitch, but consumers are buying Powell’s Smash Kitchen, his startup consumer brand that racked up $10 million in sales in its first six months since its April 2025 launch. In today’s 1 Smart Business Story, co-founders Sameer Mehta and Sean Kane, along with Powell, explain:
How they nailed the two most important features for a challenger brand to succeed
The cultural megatrends that helped Smash Kitchen resonate right out of the gate
The retail giants that have served as the brand’s launch pad and which categories it’s breaking into next
What’s your favorite celebrity-backed brand and why? Email me at [email protected] and let me know.
How Glen Powell’s Smash Kitchen Is Turning Condiments Into Stars
The movie star and his co-founders, Sameer Mehta and Sean Kane, are plotting an even bigger 2026 for their breakout organic condiment brand.
BY ALI DONALDSON, STAFF REPORTER
Sameer Mehta and Sean Kane. Photography by Mary Kang
When Sameer Mehta and Sean Kane visited Washington, D.C., last summer, they carted their own ketchup and mustard through Capitol Hill security. That way, when the entrepreneurs sat down for lunch after meeting with lawmakers, they knew precisely what they were dipping into: sauces with no GMOs, dyes, chemical stabilizers, or corn syrups.
Last April, Mehta, 38, and Kane, 48, launched Smash Kitchen, an organic condiment brand, with Top Gun: Maverick star Glen Powell, 37. Within six months of debuting in Walmart, the Los Angeles-based company hit $10 million in revenue.
“When we first started talking about Smash Kitchen, we believed there was a huge opportunity,” Powell tells Inc. “I don’t think any of us imagined how quickly people would respond.”
The brand, which projects to reach profitability in 2026, has already expanded into the supermarket chains Sprouts, H-E-B, and Erewhon, as well as Crypto.com Arena in L.A. and San Francisco’s Levi’s Stadium, but its three co-founders are thinking even bigger. They want to take on the multibillion-dollar likes of Heinz, Hunt’s, and Hellmann’s in the American condiment market by getting their better-for-you sauces and cooking oils on restaurant menus, in airports, and on school lunch trays. The last is what brought Mehta and Kane to Capitol Hill.
It’s a grand plan for a startup, but the founders’ have a track record of success: CEO Mehta was vice president of partnerships at mattress brand Casper and co-founded the dog food brand Jinx; Smash Kitchen president Kane co-founded the Honest Company with Jessica Alba; and Powell’s 2.8 million Instagram followers, well aware of his penchant for fitness, don’t hurt either.
Kane called the company’s initial sales extraordinary. “We’re really, really pumping the gas,” he says. “We just got into a race that’s been underway for the last 150 years, so we got a lot of ground to cover.”
Smash Kitchen has the benefit of timing. The brand’s all-natural bottles hit shelves at a moment when more shoppers find themselves scouring nutrition labels and ingredient lists. The majority of Americans now limit the amount of processed foods they eat, and nearly half prioritize buying organic, according to a May Ipsos survey.
That shift has coincided with the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement. While President Trump’s health secretary has prompted public outrage and CDC resignations over his controversial vaccines views, his attacks on ultra-processed foods and giant food companies have landed. After the 2024 election, confidence in the safety of food available at U.S. grocery stores fell to a historic low.
Consumers say they are even willing to pay more for food free from artificial dyes, but Smash Kitchen’s pitch rests on removing that barrier, selling organic at mass-market prices. Its sauces all cost less than $5 in Walmart—on par with its legacy competitors.
That’s what attracted investor Andrew Montgomery. The Collaborative Fund partner, who backs consumer startups from pre-seed to Series B with checks ranging from $500,000 to $15 million, has watched other better-for-you brands chase condiments before. Those companies failed to resonate at scale, he says, because they either sacrificed taste or affordability. Smash Kitchen nailed all three.
It’s a playbook that Montgomery compares to another seed-stage bet Collaborative made: Olipop. Six years after the New York-based venture capital firm first invested, the functional soda brand surpassed $400 million in revenue. Collaborative, which was also an early investor in Sweetgreen, the Farmer’s Dog, and Lyft, has funneled several million dollars into Smash Kitchen, leading the startup’s seed and Series A rounds as a minority investor.
“People will try celebrity-backed brands, but they don’t often repeat and continue to stick with it, because the price point is not there, it’s not authentic, or the product isn’t there,” says Montgomery, who credits the company’s distribution, Mehta and Kane’s operational experience, and Powell’s authentic star power with overcoming those obstacles “So far, they seem to be growing faster than expectations.”
Still, Kane, Mehta, and Powell will need to find ways to continue defying the consumer packaged goods slump, and their distribution strategy targeting restaurants, stadiums, and schools will be key. As Mehta says, “The goal of a brand is to really live aside from any of us, including Glen.”