Sweat Equity — the excellent marketing podcast hosted by Brian Blum and Alex Garcia — recently dismissed Glen Powell’s new condiment line Smash Kitchen as “another hollow, inauthentic celebrity brand. – Ouch.
I disagree. Smash Kitchen might be more substantial — and more strategically built — than Alex and Brian give it credit for.
For context, I'm a huge Sweat Equity fan and listen every week. Brian and Alex are pretty much my perfect business school marketing professors. However, I’m also a huge Glen Powell fan and need to stand up for Smash Kitchen.
Celebrity Founder Mode ≠ Start-Up Founder Mode
Glen Powell, obviously, has a day job — one that includes being one of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars (and setting completely unrealistic standards the girls I go on dates with). So yes, he’s busy. But that’s exactly why we need a different framework for evaluating what “founder mode” looks like when a celebrity launches a CPG brand. The same benchmarks that apply to a scrappy food startup or a digital-native influencer don’t cleanly map onto someone with a packed shooting schedule and a global fanbase.
Celebrity founders bring different assets — and different liabilities — to the table. What they lack in time, they can often make up for in scale, visibility, and cultural currency. A lot of the grassroots tactics that Sweat Equity rightly champions aren’t always applicable when a brand is launched by someone with 4 million Instagram followers and the backing of Walmart. This isn’t better or worse — it’s just different. Niche influencers with small but intense follower bases can be highly impactful in marketing CPG, but there’s also a place for sheer scale and broad American appeal, especially when the world’s biggest retailer is your partner
Authenticity Check
The suggestion that Powell is merely a passive name on the label seems to overlook key details about his role. He’s not a silent partner — he’s a co-founder who’s been actively involved in building and promoting Smash Kitchen. And if the best brands are extensions of their founders,
Smash Kitchen appears to be very much an extension of Glen. In interviews, Powell talks about growing up in Texas around massive family barbecues, where sauces were a centerpiece of the experience — as they are in most BBQ households. This isn’t some PR-manufactured backstory. At launch events, Powell shared personal anecdotes about his family’s homemade condiments and even spotlighted his sister Lauren’s hot sauce in Men’s Health magazine.
One of the brand’s best origin stories? A childhood prank nearly ruined ketchup for Powell completely. Creating Smash Kitchen was his way of making peace with the condiment — and that small, funny, relatable detail helps humanize him in a way most celebrity brands never manage.
Promotion Playbook
Powell doesn’t pretend to be a chef. What he brings to the table instead is charisma, cultural fluency, and the ability to show up across media in ways that actually connect. A lot of celebrity brands fall flat because they stick to the same boring PR rollout. Powell didn’t.
He went straight to The Martha Stewart Podcast, aligning himself with one of the most credible tastemakers in food. Then he created smart, personality-forward content, like a collab with NYC food creator @JacksDiningRoom, filmed at Hamburger America — the burger spot founded by George Motz, an iconic burger scholar and historian. Famously, Motz doesn’t allow ketchup on his Oklahoma-style onion burger. But Glen got the Smash Kitchen ketchup approved. That’s not just clever — it’s a smart way to speak directly to burger nerds and food purists in one swipe.
And Glen’s viral BLT recipe? A total conversation-starter. (To me, mustard on a BLT seems unhinged… but you have to respect the hustle. The internet engagement proves it worked.)An asset of having a celebrity founder is that Smash Kitchen launched with scale. . Smash Kitchen didn’t debut through DTC or a handful of boutique grocers. It launched in over 4,000 Walmart stores, priced around $5. That’s not a shortcut — it’s a fundamentally different go-to-market model.
Most new CPG brands go the slow-burn route: build a cult following, for premium products through online an specialty retailers and eventually grind their way into Whole Foods. That’s a smart strategy when your brand is small and your price point is high. Molly Baz’s Ayoh is a great example — $10 mayo sold DTC to her loyal foodie superfans, speciality stores like NYC’s Big Night or featured in special collabs like Dilly Dilly turkey sandwich at Ediths in NYC.
But Powell is playing a different game. Smash Kitchen is built for families shopping in the middle aisles of Walmart — not foodies scrolling for drops. It’s trying to reinvent the American pantry by going head-to-head with incumbents like Heinz and Hellmann’s.
And because Powell brings instant awareness, Walmart didn’t just stock the product — they helped promote it, with in-store events and food truck activations. Smash Kitchen gets the kind of visibility no indie startup can afford. Glen not trying to be niche. He’s aiming to scale, fast. And in doing so, he’s expanding what the modern celebrity-led CPG playbook can look like.
On Palm Oil, Taste, and Trade-Offs
The Sweat Equity critique of palm oil in Smash Kitchen’s recipes is valid, but not dispositive. Yes, there’s palm oil. But let’s zoom out.
Smash Kitchen cuts the worst offenders you’ll find in legacy condiments: no high-fructose corn syrup, no artificial dyes, organic ingredients across the board. Palm oil, while not ideal, is still commonly used in mass-market foods because it helps with texture, shelf stability, and cost. More importantly, taste still matters.
Smash Kitchen isn’t marketing to nutritionists or label-reading obsessives. It’s targeting families who want a better-for-you option that doesn’t taste like a science experiment. Glen Powell is trying to create something that’s healthier and familiar. You don’t fix America’s condiment problem with a $12 bottle of artisanal turmeric aioli. You fix it by offering something cleaner, better, and affordable — and yes, sometimes that involves ingredient compromises to meet customers where they are.
Consistency is Everything
If there’s one area where I do agree with Alex and Brian, it’s here: celebrity brands aren’t judged by launch day — they’re judged by year one…and beyond. We’ve all seen the pattern. Flashy debt. Big press push. Shelf space secured. Then, nothing. Without follow-up, content, innovation, and staying power, even the best-funded celebrity brands fade fast.
That’s the challenge Powell will have to meet. I Smash Kitchen wants to last, he’ll need to keep showing up. Keep making stuff. Keep engaging with his audience and retailers. The good news? Early signs are strong. He’s not just phoning it in. But founder mode isn’t a cameo. It’s a multi-season role.
A blue print for celebrity founder mode is an Reynolds. He infuses his personality into brands and delivers on consistency. For example, every year Reynolds posts a video for Fathers’s Day. He makes an Aviation Gin cocktail called the vasectomy. In his last edition, he even made it with Nick Cannon (who has 12 kids).
Ryan Reynolds is a great template—he and Glen Powell share a similar presence and delivery style, and both are involved with CPG brands in crowded markets.
If Powell stays committed — not just to brand awareness, but to brand consistency — Smash Kitchen won’t just be a celebrity vanity project. It’ll be a real player in the category.
