Eric Skae had no intentions of leading another pasta sauce giant when he stepped down as CEO of Rao’s Specialty Foods in 2018. But after his 25-year-old daughter asked him to take her to New York City Italian restaurant staple Carbone for her birthday, he decided to reconsider.
As fate would have it, he was soon contacted by Jordan Gaspard, a consultant at venture fund Excel Foods, who asked if the industry veteran could help take Carbone into retail. Skae realized he could tap into his previous experience and quickly connected with Carbone’s founders: Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi.
“The restaurants had a certain amount of awareness that we were able to leverage from a marketing standpoint,” he said.
Skae led Rao’s, which was acquired for $2.7 billion by Campbell Soup this month, for two years. During his tenure, he scaled up its pasta sauce selection and brought the brand from its New York City restaurant into retail. His position leading Carbone’s retail division — Carbone Fine Food — follows decades of food and beverage industry experience with stints at Monster Energy’s predecessor and Naked Juice.
“The way I run companies is built on a series of learnings over 35 years,” Skae said. “I’ve worked for a lot of fast-growing companies and learned a lot of different things from each brand along the way.”
Primed for pasta sauce domination
Carbone found its jarred sauces quickly resonated with consumers after they launched in 2021. The company announced last week its products are among the top ten best-selling brands in the category. The sauces posted 80% year-over-year sales growth recently, the CEO said. The company also sells pizza sauces.
The process of bringing Carbone’s sauces into shelf-stable products took a lot of trial and error. The founders left Manhattan at 3 a.m. each day and began working at the CPG company’s production facility in central Pennsylvania three hours later as they looked for the right formula, according to Skae.
Last summer, the company debuted its Spicy Vodka sauce that was based on Carbone’s most popular restaurant dish. The jar recommends consumers add their own heavy whipping cream to the sauce to achieve the same creamy taste as the signature dish. Since the launch, it has become the brand’s second best-selling product, despite having less distribution than its previously launched offerings.
“It was very tricky in the sense that I needed to match that restaurant dish because it’s been served so many times. You don’t want to ever disappoint a customer,” Skae said. “We’re hearing a lot of, ‘I love the fact that I have to add cream’ and ‘I can feel like I was a chef.’ ”
This month, Carbone released its latest product line, creamy Alfredo sauces, consisting of parmesan and romano cheeses. The company pivoted to Alfredo after observing growth in the category. Alfredo sauces rose 14% in 2023, according to Carbone. But there was just one obstacle: Carbone did not serve Alfredo sauce. The CPG company’s team worked to craft a sauce in the style of the restaurant’s dishes.
“We had to work really hard to trial our Alfredo sauce against anything that was available on the market, to make sure that it was best in class,” Skae said.
While Skae said the company sees greater potential in the future outside of sauces, Carbone will focus on pasta sauce.
“When you grow a business, if you don’t have a maniacal focus on what it is that’s working for you, you run the risk of not growing in the space because you’re taking your attention into several directions,” Skae said.