Photos by Linda Campos

When Bill Deacon looks back on the “meteoric rise” of Eastern Standard Provisions Company, the artisan snack brand he cofounded in 2019, the CEO says he sometimes feels like somebody picked him up, moved him ahead in time and dropped him back down into a thriving company.

In reality, the story Eastern Standard Provisions is one of a packaged-food company that’s as dedicated to its mission as any successful restaurant is. Beginning with exceptional products—so far, signature soft pretzels and gourmet Liège Belgian waffles, plus accompanying salts, sugars and sauces—ES Provisions earns repeat customers by offering an e-commerce version of high-touch hospitality. The company topped $14 million in sales in 2020, the Boston Globe reported, and a rep tells Edible Boston, “We expect to see 100% growth in 2022.”

The brand was born at the bar of Boston’s Eastern Standard Kitchen & Drinks, in conversations between Deacon, a regular there, and Garrett Harker, the James Beard Award–nominated restaurateur. Deacon’s longtime business associate, Mark Dimond, and pastry chef Lauren Moran, owner of Hamilton’s Honeycomb café and an ES alum, are also cofounders. Noticing trends toward online food delivery—a global revenue segment that’s nearly doubled since 2017—the entrepreneurs set out to elevate the heat-and-serve snack game with high-quality products made without artificial preservatives, Deacon says.

From the vantage point of Year Three of a pandemic, it’s clear that was a judicious business plan. But if there was an all-powerful external force in this story, it might be Oprah Winfrey. Twice in three years, the influential celebrity has named ES Provisions among Oprah’s Favorite Things, a list renowned for building buzz around consumer products. Both of the company’s snack collections so far have earned the honor: soft pretzel gift packs in 2019, and waffles in 2021.

The signal boost was certainly a windfall in ES Provisions’ first year, Deacon says. But preparing the company for “the Oprah effect,” as it’s known to many chief executive officers, turned out to be the real good fortune.

“We scaled so quickly twice: once with Oprah, and once with the onset of the pandemic,” Deacon says.

ES Provisions spent the six weeks between receiving a heads-up from Oprah’s team and the announcement finding vendors, commercial bakers and co-packers to help the small company scale up. “We worked some very, very long days” in 2019, Deacon recalls, “but seven months after shipping our first 45 boxes, we shipped 30,000 boxes for the holiday season.”

By early 2020, ES Provisions pretzels were also on menus at around 200 food service accounts. But then, of course, the pandemic fundamentally changed how people get their food. As soon as wholesale orders stalled due to lockdown advisories, direct-to-consumer delivery requests ramped up, Deacon says. Because of their experience growing so quickly to ride the Oprah wave, the leaders of ES Provisions knew what they needed to do—and they knew what wouldn’t work.

“We had a low tolerance for not performing up to the expectations of our customers,” Harker says. In a restaurant, “If there was a mistake, we could fix it in the moment and show how much we cared,” he explains. That isn’t the case with direct-to-consumer products—and, Harker says, the team was learning just how many ways to make mistakes there were in the world of order fulfillment. From virtual customer service problems to issues arising with third-party carriers, ES Provisions wasn’t always in its managers’ control.

So in April 2020, the startup stepped up. Instead of relying on outside vendors to meet increasing demand for their products, several members of the ES Provisions team opted to quarantine together at Deacon’s Maine vacation house, where they fulfilled orders. Meanwhile, CRO Dimond rented a large warehouse in Lawrence, where they set up socially distanced distribution operations by hiring furloughed employees from Harker’s restaurants. The investments paid off: “We did almost as much [sales-wise] in the month of April than what we had projected to do for the entire year,” Deacon says.

To help with the brand’s national reach, ES Provisions has a co-packing partner in the Midwest, Harker says, but by the end of 2020 the company moved into a 17,000-square-foot headquarters in Waltham, where about 60 people work today. “I can walk out on the floor and see some of Eastern Standard’s brightest stars that have really adapted to this new reality,” Harker says. One-third of ES Provisions employees used to work for his restaurant group in Kenmore Square.

It’s a connection to the original Eastern Standard, which permanently closed because of an impasse with its landlord, Harker confirmed in 2021. (The day after this interview with Edible Boston, he announced he will bring four new restaurant concepts to Kenmore Square in early 2023.)

And the carb-fueled marathon has only just begun for ES Provisions. Belgian chocolate-dipped Liège waffles landed in the online shop earlier this year, and the company is getting ready to launch a gluten-free pretzel soon, as well. During a recent meeting with chief product officer Moran, Deacon says they discussed new ideas for snacktime reinvention, too. After all, the future will be here before we know it.

esprovisions.com

This story appeared in the Spring 2022 issue.