Local restaurants and shops have been infiltrating the grocery store aisles for a while now: Little Sesame hummus. Cava dips. Laoban Dumplings. Dolcezza Gelato and Ice Cream Jubilee. Now, the founders of Swizzler, one of DC’s top burger spots, are bringing restaurant-quality fries to the freezer section.
Jesse & Ben’s—named after co-founders Jesse Konig and Ben Johnson—launched in June at local independent grocery stores, including Yes! Organic and Streets Market. Beginning this week, the DC-made product will also be available in the freezer aisles of all Whole Foods and Mom’s Organic Markets across the Mid-Atlantic.
“We went and walked around some of the grocery stores and noticed, like, all the brands in the grocery store aisle were pretty much the same things we saw in the ’90s when we were kids,” Konig says. “None of them tasted good or even close to what we were doing.”
The boardwalk-style fries ($8.99 a bag) are cooked in either grass-fed beef tallow or avocado oil—the latter comes in both classic sea salt and rosemary garlic flavors. The owners have intentionally steered clear of seed oil, which can be highly processed. (Swizzler itself has also largely moved away from seed oils at its restaurant, though it’s still present in ingredients like mayo.) Jesse & Ben’s starts with non-GMO Idaho Russet potatoes, which are cut, blanched, seasoned, and fried once before they’re frozen. At home, you can cook them in an oven or an air-fryer. (I tried them in the oven and found them very easy to make. They have a classic fry look and a taste that was a hit with kids.)
“If you go to the grocery store right now and look at the back of the nutrition labels for every brand of frozen fries, you’ll see weird ingredients like dextrose and sodium bicarbonate,” Konig says. “We’re trying to pull away all that stuff and just use what you would get when you go to a restaurant, which is usually just potatoes and oil and salt.”
Konig and Johnson, friends from college, launched Swizzler in 2014 as a food truck specializing in hot dogs before switching to smash burgers and fried chicken sandwiches. They now have a standalone location in Navy Yard, plus kiosks in Nationals Park, FedEx Field, and Capitol One Arena. But that first brick-and-mortar location in Navy Yard was initially supposed to open in the spring of 2020, when everything got shutdown by the pandemic. As they struggled to keep the business afloat, they decided to convert their food truck kitchen in Ivy City into a mini fry factory.
The brand was originally called Spuds Fries, but Konig and Johnson renamed it after they realized “Spuds” was too generic to trademark. In addition to getting into stores, they also began selling wholesale to other restaurants, for whom making their own fries in-house can be labor intensive and expensive. Konig says they don’t want to advertise which restaurants use their products because some of them do a second fry in seed oil, and they want to avoid confusing customers who have allergies or care about avoiding seed oils.
Currently, selling to restaurants makes up 60 to 70 percent of Jesse & Ben’s business, but Konig expects retail to rise to 80 percent of sales as they ramp up their availability in grocery stores. Meanwhile, they’re already looking to expand into a new production space, likely in Maryland, by the end of the year.
“We’ve eaten way more French fries in the last year than is probably healthy,” Konig says. “And I can tell you from my experience, at least, there’s a pretty noticeable difference between the Big Potato fries and our fries.”
Jessica Sidman covers the people and trends behind D.C.’s food and drink scene. Before joining Washingtonian in July 2016, she was Food Editor and Young & Hungry columnist at Washington City Paper. She is a Colorado native and University of Pennsylvania grad.
