Checkout Chats: Ayeshah Abuelhiga, Founder of Mason Dixie Foods

The frozen food aisle isn't what it used to be. Gone are the days when "frozen" meant settling for less. Today's consumers are discovering restaurant-quality meals, artisanal breads from brands like Wildgrain, frozen pizza from the world's best pizzaiolo, and yes, even scratch-made biscuits in their freezer sections. This frozen renaissance has attracted everyone from tech entrepreneurs to Michelin-minded chefs, all betting that quality can thrive below-zero. Leading this transformation is Ayeshah Abuelhiga, founder of Mason Dixie Foods, whose journey from an 80-square-foot food stall to national frozen food brand offers a masterclass in pivoting with purpose.

From 80 Square Feet to Frozen Aisles

"CPG was not in the picture," Abuelhiga laughs, recalling Mason Dixie's 2014 launch. "My goal was to open the Sweetgreen of better-for-you comfort food."

That vision started in DC's Union Market with what might be the smallest restaurant footprint ever: 80 square feet. But what they lacked in space, they made up for in demand. And lots of it. Eventually lines wrapped around blocks for hours, and the tiny operation couldn't keep up.

"You can only stack biscuits so high," Abuelhiga explains. "You can only serve so many people."

The IOU That Changed Everything

Frustrated with turning customers away, Abuelhiga made a decision that would transform her business. After shutting down at 10:30 one morning—having run out of food yet again— her pastry chef just started to make extra biscuits, which she decided to just freeze and put in "cute little IOU bags."

"My pastry chef thought I was nuts," she recalls. "He was like, 'You're ruining the integrity of the product because you're freezing it.' And I was like, it's freezing. I'm not adding anything to it. Let's just see what happens."

What happened next was simply pure serendipity. Three months later, a woman who'd received frozen biscuits as an IOU emailed. It turned out she was the regional marketing manager for Whole Foods.

The timing couldn't have been better. Whole Foods was rethinking its frozen section. As it had turned out, Abuelhiga's biscuits fit perfectly into this vision.

Their first store launch, the day before Thanksgiving 2015, exceeded all expectations. "We outsold butter and milk sales that day," Abuelhiga notes. "And thus, that went viral to the Whole Foods ecosystem, and that was the moment where I was like, okay. I guess we're doing CPG now."

The Distribution Reality Check

The transition from restaurant to a scaled CPG operation brought harsh lessons about the complexities of frozen distribution. In the early days, team members would take car shares, fill them with cases of product, and hand-deliver to stores.

"These are things you can't do anymore," Abuelhiga reflects. You can only do things that don't scale for so long.

The real wake-up call came when they thought they'd made it big with their first distributor order: 24 cases. "I was like, this isn't even a whole pallet," she laughs. "People think it's like you go from nothing to full truckload. No. No. No."

But here's the thing, even when the orders did grow, the problems just got bigger.

Eventually they made it to an 11-pallet order. "We were rushing through it. We're like, yeah. We've made it, look at these big POs. Woo," Abuelhiga recalls.

Three months later, reality hit. They received a massive deduction on that order. They were paid a penny on what should have been that entire 11-pallet order. The distributor claimed the product was never shipped.

"I made this poor man crawl through this freezer looking for each of those 11 pallets they claim were missing," Abuelhiga recalls of her confrontation with the distributor's VP. "That was a big moment where I was like, holy crap. When you hand your product over, it's not yours, and it might not be theirs. They don't care about it."

Reimagining the Frozen Aisle

After a decade in the frozen business, Abuelhiga has strong opinions about how the category should evolve. Her vision? Flip the current ratio completely.

"It should be 80% of the products are better-for-you and 20% are naughty goodies. Right now, it's the opposite," she argues. "And to be honest, I think it's the wrong allocation."

The math, she explains, is simple but overlooked by many retailers. A $10 premium item at 40-50% margin beats ten $1 value items that are perpetually on promotion. "Those $1 items are typically 20% off all the time. When you think about that multiple, it does not add up."

Retailers often prioritize value brands under the assumption they drive volume and cover operating costs, but the economics tell a different story. Value brands require massive volume to deliver meaningful margins, whereas premium options can generate better profitability with far fewer sales—and less operational complexity.

Beyond the economics, Abuelhiga points out how the current frozen aisle layout reinforces outdated consumer habits. "Consumers only buy what's in front of them. If you're giving them cheap choices, they'll continue to buy the cheap choices." She believes retailers need to break this cycle by featuring better-for-you products more prominently and reducing their dependence on low-margin, high-volume brands.

She also calls out the category monopolies, using breakfast as an example: "The big red company that shall not be named has an average of 85 SKUs to our 4. And that's a monopoly."

This disparity doesn't just limit consumer choice, it actively stifles innovation. Abuelhiga argues that dedicating more shelf space to emerging, better-for-you brands would diversify offerings, encourage healthier competition, and ultimately benefit both retailers and consumers.

The Science of Frozen Success

Abuelhiga knows that success in the frozen aisle requires more than just better ingredients—it demands mastering the technical challenges unique to frozen food.

Take Mason Dixie's recent innovation: breakfast burritos that actually reheat properly. It's a problem that has plagued the frozen category for years, soggy burritos. Luckily Abuelhiga knew exactly how to fix it.

"Most of them are made with IQF—like frozen pellets," Abuelhiga explains. "They put the frozen pellets into a tortilla, and they wrap it all together. So you got water on water on water. By the time you cook it, you're steaming it and boiling it."

Mason Dixie's fix was elegantly simple: "Ours are skillet cooked. We cook all the raw ingredients together...releasing all the moisture. Then we put it into the burrito."

The result is a burrito that reheats evenly without the dreaded cold center or soggy tortilla.

Lessons from the Freezer

Looking back on a decade in frozen, Abuelhiga sees her management consulting background as crucial preparation for the CPG world. "One of the things that it makes you think about is how to be customer first," she notes. But in CPG, your customer isn't just the end consumer—it's also your distributor.

"You can't treat a distributor like a throwaway relationship, and you can't forget they are your customer," she emphasizes. "They're the ones paying you. So you really gotta make sure that you're top of mind. They're slinging thousands of products."

Her advice for founders entering the space is blunt: "It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. It's the first thing I tell people."

Rapid Fire with Ayeshah

Most underrated frozen item in your own freezer right now? "Smoked turkey necks and wings. The easiest way to add robust flavor to anything that you're making. It's nice to have it frozen because they're massive...but it's like, at any moment on a whim, bust that out."

Dream collab chef or restaurant for a limited-edition biscuit? "I'll have to say if we were gonna do a collab with a chef, I would say Roy Choi. I'm half Korean, and I feel like his whole blending of cultures is really good. And then I'd say In-N-Out. Like, In-N-Out needs breakfast, and we could help."

Favorite current CPG product? "Well, I have to say our new crispy chicken sandwich that's coming out is legit. That is my baby. And then I would actually say Siete tortilla chips. People hate on them, but I think they're fabulous. They have the perfect crunch, perfect thinness."

Mason Dixie Foods proves that sometimes the best pivots come from solving immediate problems. What started as frozen biscuits in "cute little IOU bags" has evolved into a brand helping redefine what frozen food can be.