True Made Foods
Abe Kamarck (center) with his family in Alexandria.
Using the same grit and determination he used to become a successful Navy helicopter pilot overseas, Alexandria resident Abe Kamarck is now finding his niche in the business world with a food company he started called True Made Foods.
The company makes low-sugar condiments by switching out sugar and corn syrup for veggies.
Born in Washington, D.C., Kamarck grew up in Arlington. When he was 10 years old, his family moved to Brooklyn, N.Y. and later back to the D.C. metro area. He went to high school at Walt Whitman in Bethesda and headed to Vanderbilt on a Navy ROTC scholarship.
“It’s strange looking back at all the places I lived as a kid and what they have now become,” said Kamarck, who now lives in Alexandria with his wife and their four children. “Clarendon was actually a little seedy when I was a kid. It’s unrecognizable now. It’s strange because I can’t afford to live any place I grew up.”
An Act of Rebellion
While most would consider not joining the military as an act of rebellion, it was the opposite for Kamarck. “My dad was a conscientious objector in Vietnam, so I guess joining the military was my own way of rebelling,” he said.
“My parents weren’t against me joining the military, but they definitely weren’t pushing it,” he noted. “My parents had me young and my dad was a junior lawyer when I was kid. He was never around and always grumpy. His idea of spending quality time with me was letting me play in the conference room of his office while he worked on weekends.
Those experiences definitely made me want to avoid working in an office at all possible costs and likely influenced my desire to join the military and subsequently become an entrepreneur.” Kamarck was deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, but as a Navy pilot, he never physically went into Iraq. He was deployed as a helicopter pilot on the USS Gettysburg with the Enterprise Strike Group.
His role was to identify possible threats. In general, as a Seahawk pilot, the biggest challenge, he said, “was always the ambiguity of what you were expected to do on every mission.”
"Our mission was to launch and ‘go see what’s beyond the horizon,’” he said. “Basically our mission every night was to see what was out there in the dark. You never knew what to expect and had to always be prepared for every-thing. Most of the time, it would be rote and boring, but we had a few exciting finds and calls that we had to be ready for. These missions forced me to be a jack of all trades and a master of none, which really helps set the stage for entrepreneurship.”
Impact Entrepreneurship
Kamarck discovered something called “impact entrepreneurship” when he was in business school in London.
“I was stationed in England for my shore duty and was working for the US European Command in places like Africa and Eastern Europe, then on the weekends I was taking classes at the London Business School,” he said. Impact Entrepreneurship — using entrepreneurial businesses to solve/affect social problems — seemed like a perfect blend of the problems he was working on with the military and what he was learning every week in business school. Fast forward to life back in the United States, where his family inspired him to build a better mousetrap...or in this case, a healthier condiment.
True Made Foods
“I have always hated ketchup,” he said. “I’m a hot sauce guy and love spicy stuff. I’ve always looked down on ketchup as nothing but red sugar. Regular ketchup has more sugar than ice cream, ounce per ounce. But ketchup became part of my life when I had kids. I tried so hard to keep my kids from eating ketchup, but that was a losing battle. We love cooking out and going to burger places and my daughter puts ketchup on almost everything, so I was stuck.”
He met a guy at a Patriot Bootcamp event who told him about how he and his wife had found a recipe online for putting vegetables in ketchup and it “just sent off the lightbulb for me,” he said.
Kamarck grew up helping his mother in the kitchen and learned to make salad dressings and pasta sauces at a young age.
“We always used vegetables like carrots and squash to naturally sweeten our pasta sauces, so I thought, why wouldn’t it work for ketchup?”
True Made Foods was born, and got its start at the Capitol Post, a business incubator in Alexandria that teaches military vets and their spouses how to think and act like entrepreneurs. Last fall, he received an assist with funding from the PenFed Foundation’s Veteran Entrepreneur Investment Program, to help move the company to the next level.
Fries with a Side of Sugar
Most people don’t know this but ketchup, BBQ sauce and sriracha are probably the worst products (from a health perspective) in your refrigerator, Kamarck noted. Per ounce, he said, ketchup has more sugar than ice cream, and sriracha has more sugar than ketchup.
True Made Foods’ low-sugar ketchup contains half the added sugar per serving of a traditional ketchup; its key ingredients are tomatoes, carrots, butternut squash and spinach. The company’s barbecue sauce has 70 percent less sugar than leading brands.
Kamarck is excited about his company’s latest “game changer.” “Our brand-new No Added Sugar Ketchup may change ketchup forever,” he said. “We don’t use any artificial or refined sweeteners at all, only whole fruits and veggies. Every ingredient in our No Added Sugar Ketchup is good for you. You could live on it, which is good because I know a lot of kids live on ketchup.”
There seems to be a big market for his products. True Made Foods can be found in more than 2,400 stores nationwide and are about to add another 1,500 this year. Stores include Walmart, Wegmans, Safeway, ShopRite and is coming soon to Whole Foods, Giant and Giant Eagle.
The sauces are made in a facility in North Carolina near the Virginia border. In 2018, the company saw 120+ percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) on gross sales and Karmack expects that to increase in 2019.
The company is aiming to reach $2 million in sales this year. When asked what’s next, he said with a smile: “Putting Heinz out of business.”
