Hummus Catches On In America (As Long As It’s Flavored)

“BACK home, they would shoot me in the head for doing this to hummus,” Majdi Wadi said as he waited to board a flight to Los Angeles, where he would meet with Costco executives to pitch his company’s roster of 14 flavored hummus varieties, including artichoke-garlic and spinach.

By “home,” Mr. Wadi meant Kuwait, where he was born, and Jordan, from which he immigrated in 1994, places where hummus is usually a purée of chickpeas, sesame paste, lemon, garlic and not much else.

Mr. Wadi, chief executive of Holy Land, a specialty foods producer here, has in the last few years broadened the palette of hummus, and its appeal.

“I’m making an American product,” he confessed sotto voce. “And this is what Americans want. Flavors and varieties and guacamole.”

Holy Land opened in Minneapolis in 1987 as a storefront cafe that sold tubs of hummus as a sideline. Back then, Americans didn’t eat a lot of hummus. A staple of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, hummus was long relegated to health food stores and “ethnic” aisles of markets. More recently, though, Americans seem to have decided that this low-fat, high-protein snack with a little olive oil stirred in is not so exotic. Industry giants have joined the market, for chips require dips. In 2008 Frito-Lay North America, a division of PepsiCo, became an owner of Sabra Dipping Company, producer of more than a dozen hummus varieties, including one with salsa.

Fifteen years ago, hummus was a $5 million business led by a smattering of companies. Today it dominates its sales category, called refrigerated flavored spreads, which has more than $325 million in annual retail sales, according to Symphony IRI Group, a Chicago market research firm. Sales are up more than 18 percent in the last year, it said.

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