Nick Wiseman, co-founder of Little Sesame, joins Hospitality Hangout’s Foodfluencers series to tell the story of how a tiny hummus pop-up in a Washington, D.C. basement grew into a national food brand.

Nick’s background is restaurants through and through. He started cooking professionally as a teenager, worked the fine-dining circuit in New York, and met future Little Sesame co-founder Ronen Tenne while working the fish station at a Michael White restaurant. Years later, they reunited in D.C. with the idea of bringing restaurant-level food to more people, with fewer rules and a lot more fun.

Little Sesame began in a 500-square-foot basement beneath DGS, a Jewish deli Nick was operating in D.C. The original goal was modest: serve a few dozen people a day and make better use of the space. Instead, customers immediately responded to the freshly spun hummus, and the pop-up began doing several times the volume the team expected.

Then COVID changed the business.

With downtown office traffic gone, Little Sesame started hand-packing pints of hummus and selling them out the front door. A few weeks later, a Whole Foods forager reached out. That opened a new challenge: how do you turn restaurant-quality hummus with a five-day shelf life into a grocery product without loading it with preservatives? Nick explains how the team spent about a year working through food science and eventually used high-pressure processing to preserve freshness while keeping the ingredient list clean.

Episode Credits:

• Produced by: Branded Hospitality Media
• Hosted by: Michael Schatzberg, Jimmy Frischling
• Producer: Julie Zucker
• Creative Director: Adam Levine
• Show Runner: Drewe Raimi
• Post Production: Three Cheers Media

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