Ottolenghi's line of condiments has just landed at De Bijenkorf, two years after it first launched in the UK. It's a small piece of retail news, but it says something bigger: it's a sign of how far the category has come, and is progressing.
While we see a widening category opportunity as generally positive, the wider context is a reminder of why we started Fil in the first place.
A bigger shelf is a good sign
Every dish exists for a reason. Understanding the culture behind a food matters, both to the people who come from it and to the integrity of the food itself.
There's a reason you don't break spaghetti before it goes in the pot.
There's a reason chocolate hummus shouldn't exist.
So when a wider range of Middle Eastern flavours starts showing up on mainstream shelves, it means more people trying more of what we grew up eating. It means the category has room to grow.
Ultimately, this is positive - but how is the story of those products being told?
Growth on the shelf isn't the same as representation on it
The Middle Eastern section in most mainstream supermarkets is small to begin with, and even within that small space, the brands that get the most shelf space are often the ones with the least direct connection to the culture they're drawing from.
We grew up in a world where this was rarely questioned. In the current food landscape however, it's a question worth asking of any brand, ours included: who is actually behind this, and what is their relationship to the food?
For larger corporations, the range you see is likely built in a boardroom. It's based on market data, focus groups, and then propped up with a story and language that, these days, most people can see right through. It’s contrived marketing.
We cannot determine with certainty each team's individual history with the products they are launching, and it would be unfair to do so. There are, after all, brands developed by people who are in fact connected to the culture of the product, that have made it to mainstream shelves - and, objectively speaking, they don’t exactly taste bad. However if you’re familiar with what the original product can and should taste like, you’ll often find that these products simply fall flat; they taste bland and diluted.
The benefit these brands have however, is that most people simply don’t know better - and they know this. Flavour and quality is actively sacrificed for higher margins, and to appeal to the mass-market. It’s appealing to preferences that have arguably been manufactured by these corporations themselves - if your first interaction with a product is a watered down version of the original, how will you know what the original should taste like? It's cynical.
Education and re-education is notoriously difficult, but thankfully customer demands for quality, and now provenance, are changing. The former is still paramount, but for both challenger and more established brands, the latter is becoming more relevant than ever before.
That is what makes Ottolenghi’s arrival on a bigger shelf both encouraging and bittersweet: it expands the category while sharpening the question at the heart of it - whose food is being represented, by whom, and on what terms?
Where this leaves the shelf
More people trying more authentic Middle Eastern flavours, in more places, is a genuinely good thing for our category. People ultimately shop for brands they know and trust, but increased familiarity with cuisine leads to more curiosity around it, which opens the door for discovery and growth of the shelf. For Fil, that presents an opportunity.
From day one, our approach has been to put the story and the heritage of Shatta on equal footing with the quality of the jar. For us, Shatta is nostalgia, it's family, it's home, it's community. These are all ingredients you won't find on the back of the jar, but they give it a flavour no other product can replicate.
When someone tries Fil, we want them tasting that: something made by people who are still deeply connected to where it comes from, not a version of it filtered through corporate benchmarks and guidelines.
But shelf space answers one question and leaves another untouched: not just how much room there is, but whose name is actually on the label filling it, and whose isn't.
A wider shelf is only a win for everyone if the people originally behind the category get a real seat on it, and a stake in how the story gets told.
Get Your Fil — and taste what Shatta is when the people who grew up on it are the ones making it.
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