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Zoup! Brings Restaurant-Quality Broth to Retail
Independently Owned Company Innovates the Broth Aisle with a Super-Premium Lineup
Farmington Hills, MI – Zoup! Specialty Products, which brought to market the first super-premium broth and the first broth packaged in recyclable glass jars, has delivered better flavor, new consumers, and a higher ring to the once traditional category. Created by Eric Ersher and the team behind Zoup! Eatery, the successful soup-themed, fast-casual restaurants, Zoup! Good, Really Good® Broth was introduced in the fall of 2013 at a store local to the company’s headquarters in Michigan. After overcoming barriers to entry and learning how to compete in a category with big-budget, Fortune 100 companies, Zoup! steadily gained traction and is today in over 12,000 stores nationwide, including natural and mainstream retailers like Walmart, Sprouts and Kroger. Experiencing 231% revenue growth over the last three years, Zoup! Specialty Products has been featured on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing private companies in America since 2019.
With locally owned and operated Zoup! Eatery locations across the U.S. and Canada, Eric Ersher, founder and CEO of Zoup!, would consistently hear from customers, “Why doesn’t chicken broth sold at grocery stores taste as good as what’s served at restaurants?” It was those inquiries, along with a passion to fill a void in the marketplace, that inspired Ersher to get into the consumer product business. If there’s anything he knew after his 20+ years working in the spice and soup business and serving customers face-to-face since 1998, it was what made a good broth, and not a single product on retail shelves possessed the complex and balanced taste that he believed people deserved. Or, in his words, “was good enough to drink.” Ersher was determined to change this, and his know-how and experience made him an ideal candidate to do so.
Eric and the Zoup! team leveraged the restaurant franchise business to fund the new venture and launch Zoup! Specialty Products. They invested more than three years of research to create a high-quality broth that was perfectly delicious and shelf stable. To make Zoup! Good, Really Good® Broth burst with homemade flavor, they prepared it in kettles in small batches using restaurant-quality cooking methods and standards. Using only the freshest and finest quality ingredients, they also designed it to be low in calories, keto and paleo-friendly, and completely free of artificial ingredients, preservatives, gluten, GMO’s, fat, trans fat and saturated fat. In addition, to set it apart from all the boxes and cans on retail shelves, they packaged Zoup! Broth in recyclable glass jars to showcase its quality ingredients and delicious golden color.
Since its launch, the independently owned company has crafted nine broths designed for home cooks, including a new seafood broth and new spicy chicken bone broth, plus original and low sodium chicken broth, veggie broth, chicken and beef bone broth, and certified organic chicken and veggie broth. Passionate about all things soup and broth, Zoup! is continuing to innovate with its launch of Zoup! Good, Really Good® Culinary Concentrates™, a flavor-forward, small-batch lineup of gourmet broth concentrates, which will be available online and for retailers to carry this fall. In 2022, Zoup! will also introduce a new product lineup that truly encompasses the company’s expertise about what makes exceptional soup. More news to come this winter!
Said Ersher, “The Good, Really Good tagline in our name truly means something to us. It inspires us every day to provide relevant products that are discernably better than the competition and win in side-by-side blind taste tests. Our extremely high standards for flavor and exceptional quality that we demand from our products is what sets us apart and has found us success in this competitive industry. We took our know-how from a history rooted in serving soup to customers year after year and let that knowledge help us create a line of truly chef-quality broth, uniquely packaged in glass jars, and sold at a premium price primed to disrupt a then stagnant category. Today, those broths have given us a great base to build on, setting the stage for new products in the pipeline that push the boundaries of what pantry staples can and should taste like.”
For more information about Zoup! Specialty Products, visit www.zoupbroth.com and follow @ZoupGoodReallyGood on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. For more information about Zoup! Eatery, visit www.zoup.com.
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