We’re here in New Orleans for the IDDBA show. Booth 2853. That’s the formal reason. But before stepping into the Convention Center, I made one deliberate detour.

Even with a clean diet, structure, and typical restraint, I couldn’t skip Café du Monde.

Because Café du Monde isn’t just a café. It’s a living system.

The green-and-white striped awning, the powdered sugar mist, the line snaking around Decatur Street—it’s not hype. It’s heritage.

And as I sat there, watching the choreography of trays and tourists, I realized: Café du Monde and Zina’s have more in common than their palette. What they’ve built through focus, we’ve shaped through discipline. The connection goes deeper than color.

 

Family Brands Don’t Scale. They Extend.

 

Café du Monde has been family-owned since 1862. Zina’s was founded in 1983—born in a small New Jersey kitchen, where soups and crêpes were made by hand . Four decades later, we’ve expanded into dips, salads, and ready meals, served in over 6,000 stores . Still, the hands haven’t changed. We still cut, mix, and pack every product in-house. Machinery doesn’t lead; people do.

Legacy isn’t an asset class. It’s a decision matrix.

Café du Monde’s menu hasn’t changed in over a century. And that’s both its strength and its constraint. It works in New Orleans. It wouldn’t work everywhere—and they learned that the hard way.

 

What Went Wrong in Japan

 

At one point, Café du Monde licensed its brand in Japan. It peaked with more than 30 stores. But the brand didn’t translate. The experience diluted. Eventually, the entire footprint disappeared, quietly.

The lesson? You can’t outsource ritual. You can’t franchise feel.

At Zina’s, we’ve grown carefully by design. That doesn’t mean isolationist. We source ingredients globally—from premium Greek feta to specific Mediterranean oils—but each partner is vetted not just for price or volume, but for culinary and cultural fit . What you put in your products matters. And our customers expect clarity, not compromise.

We’re not scaling for show. We’re scaling what works.

 

Brand as Operating System

 

There’s a structural echo between the two brands. Café du Monde protects its identity through simplicity. At Zina’s, we protect ours through iteration. Our Chickpea Salad doesn’t just “taste Mediterranean.” It respects ingredient systems rooted in tradition, adjusted for modern palates.

Tradition is not a relic—it’s a protocol. You update it carefully, without corrupting the core.

That’s how we think about every new SKU. Every new state. Every new retail shelf.

 

Come By

 

So if you’re in New Orleans for IDDBA, and you care about food systems that scale without slipping—stop by Booth 2853. We’ll show you what careful growth looks like, from sourcing to shelf.

No powdered sugar, but you’ll still leave with something that sticks.