Eva Thorne Thinks Southern Food Has a Pricing Problem, Not a Quality One

The founder of The Garden of Eva argues that US Southern food’s real barrier in Britain isn’t taste. It’s the vocabulary buyers use to price it.

A reader left a comment under one of Eva Thorne’s newsletters last month. He had been reading a Condé Nast Traveller piece on Southern food’s arrival in London, and he wanted to draw a comparison to Korean food, which had spent years priced in Britain at whatever the cheapest version anyone remembered eating would bear. Then he wrote the line that stayed with her: “The vocabulary gap you’re describing is a pricing gap wearing different clothes.”

Thorne, who has spent five years building a pantry ingredients business around the foodways of the US South, had already been circling the same idea. “I’m no longer convinced that ‘Southern food’ in the UK has just a quality problem,” she wrote back. “I think it’s actually a price ceiling.”

The category she is arguing about is not standing still. The UK’s barbecue and outdoor dining market was worth an estimated £1.75 billion in 2024, and “Americana” styles such as ribs, pulled pork and barbecue sauce have spread well beyond specialist restaurants into supermarkets and mainstream menus, according to a 2026 industry report from UK barbecue manufacturer Barbequick. Diners like the food. Thorne’s argument is narrower and less comfortable: that liking it is not the same as valuing it, and that the language used to describe Southern cooking, “soulful,” “rustic,” “comfort food,” has kept a whole category of American regional cuisine priced as if it were a novelty rather than a craft.

Thorne is the founder of The Garden of Eva, a London pantry ingredients company that makes relishes, sauces, jams and pantry ingredients drawn from the foodways of the US South (her heritage), and increasingly sells them into professional kitchens rather than just home ones. The jars are just part of  the business, she says. They are proof that an argument can become something people are willing to buy.

A Vocabulary Built to Undervalue

Thorne’s case starts with a historical claim she makes with some precision. The techniques that shaped cooking in the US South, she argues, have close technical parallels to the ones French cuisine is celebrated for. Classic French kitchens are organised around mise en place, the discipline of preparation, timing and station work. The same discipline, she says, existed in the kitchens where enslaved cooks and their descendants worked in the American South, “but it didn’t look the same.” A pit crew’s staging of rubs, woods and brines is a version of it. French sauce-making is built on reduction and ratio. Southern pan gravies, preserves and reductions, she says, “follow the same principles of emulsion, concentration, and balance.”

What separated the two traditions, in her account, was not technique but institutional visibility. French culinary knowledge was written into textbooks, taught in formal schools and recognised by professional guilds. Cooks in the American South who developed their methods under slavery were forbidden from reading and writing, so what they knew passed on by apprenticeship and oral transmission rather than by a cookbook with a named author. Historically, Southern Black cooking was tied to rural life and enslaved labour, categories that were devalued, even as individual techniques from that cooking became part of mainstream American food without credit following them.

That history, she argues, is still doing commercial work today. Food associated with the Black American South enters British restaurant kitchens and is, in her words, “rebranded and presented as something novel, and stripped of its roots.” The fix she proposes is not sentimental. It is the same vocabulary the food trade already extends to Champagne and Parmigiano Reggiano without a second thought: provenance, region, technique. “Southern” on its own, she has written, is too broad a word to carry a premium. Louisiana, the Lowcountry, Appalachia and the Gulf Coast are distinct food cultures with different soils, climates and histories, and treating them as one undifferentiated category is precisely what keeps every dish inside it pinned to the same cheap reference price.

“I’m no longer convinced that ‘Southern food’ in the UK has just a quality problem. I think it’s actually a price ceiling.”

Eva Thorne, Founder, The Garden of Eva

What Chefs Actually Buy

The cultural argument only travels as far as the product specification lets it, and Thorne is candid that it took her time to learn this. “The cultural argument exists but the volume on it is muted until a chef is satisfied about operational aspects of the products,” she says. Professional kitchens buy consistency, viscosity, stability and predictable prep times before they buy a story.

So Thorne increasingly started designing products that could travel across a menu, a labour of love that took more than a year of recipe development and iteration. The Garden of Eva’s New Orleans Creole-inspired mustard is her example: chefs already understand what a mustard does, that it belongs in dressings, marinades, glazes and sauces, so the thirteen herbs and spices, the hint of horseradish, hot sauce and molasses can carry the regional story without asking the buyer to learn a new category first. Her New Orleans Creole-inspired tomato jam works the same way. She built it to move beyond the cheeseboard, into a pan sauce, a glaze for salmon, a tart filling mixed with cream cheese and herbs, or stirred into a sauce for extra depth. The jam went on to win two Great Taste Stars from the Guild of Fine Food, whose judges, tasting blind, called it a “sauce” rather than a condiment, a distinction Thorne read as proof the versatility had registered. “Products that serve multiple purposes can command a higher price point,” she says, “precisely because they are doing so much work.”

From the Edge of the Plate to the Centre

The commercial turn Thorne describes was less a single decision than a slow correction. “I finally figured out that my products needed to move from the edge of the plate and occasional use to the centre of the plate and regular use,” she says. That meant faster sales cycles, and a deliberate move toward foodservice, restaurants and large venues such as sports stadia, rather than retail. It also meant giving up the branded jar as the unit of the business: what a chef needs is a catering tub, not a label with her name on it. “Get your product listed on the menu,” she says, “and that’s your brand recognition and equity.”

She is unambiguous about the cost of arriving at that insight later than she would have liked. “It took too long for me to figure this all out,” she says, “so it cost me a lot of time and market positioning.” It is a rare moment in her account where the argument and the business admit friction with each other: the case for Southern foodways as craft is cultural and can afford to be patient, but the business testing it still has to sell.

One early proof point of the model already exists. The Garden of Eva’s chow chow, a pickled relish drawn from a family recipe Thorne made with her American, Southern, Virginia-born mother, was used by the restaurant group Honest Burgers as a topping on a New Orleans-style fried chicken sandwich, one of its monthly specials. The chain used the chow chow again a year ago, in a “Best of the South” burger special. Across the two collaborations, Honest bought more than two tons of the condiment, a relish eaten across the US South much like salt and pepper.

As she spent more time with chefs, buyers and hospitality operators, Thorne found herself becoming interested in a slightly different question. Why do some meals become memorable while others disappear almost immediately? The answer, she concluded, rarely sits only on the plate. It sits in the interaction between food, place, conversation, expectation and participation. The same interest that began with Southern foodways gradually widened into a broader fascination with hospitality itself: not simply how food is served, but how people gather around it. The products remained important, but increasingly they became a way of exploring larger questions about experience and connection.

That interest now reaches well beyond product development. What began as an argument about how regional food cultures are valued has become a wider exploration of how organisations use food. Thorne has become interested in the role food plays in client hospitality, workplace culture and executive gatherings, not as entertainment but as a medium through which people encounter place, story and one another. The question, she says, is less what is being served than what the experience is designed to make possible.

She now spends increasing amounts of time thinking about the design of food-led experiences: how organisations welcome clients, how teams gather, how food expresses a sense of place, and why some occasions feel carefully considered while others feel merely well produced. She has begun turning her thinking into programmes to support hospitality operators around those questions, exploring the intersection of culinary culture, belonging and memory. Food remains the entry point rather than the destination.

From Policy to a Pantry Ingredient

Thorne’s path to a pantry ingredients company did not begin as a full-time pivot. She studied history at Harvard and took a PhD in political science at MIT, with a focus on international political economy and the comparative politics of developing countries. Her earlier career ran across government, non-profit and private-sector work: over eight years on the board of the international development organisation Pact, two stints as a director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change between 2017 and 2019, and, from 2020 to 2022, a Special Advisor role there on Covid-19 policy, writing briefs on vaccines, therapeutics and testing for senior leaders while working directly with Tony Blair.

She founded The Garden of Eva in May 2021, while still in the Covid policy role, starting with the award-winning chow chow and pickled watermelon rind recipes she had made with her mother. She ran the food business alongside a later managing director role at the sustainability advisory firm Xynteo, from 2022 to 2024, before The Garden of Eva became her main focus. The pickled watermelon rind went on to win two Great Taste Stars in its own right, and Whole Foods Market UK named her chili-watermelon jam to its 2024 Food and Drink Trends list, for what the retailer called the complex heat trend. She still co-founds Lagos Carbon, a separate venture she has run since 2025, alongside the food business.

An Argument, Not a Gap in the Market

Thorne draws a sharp line between finding a gap in the market and building a business around an argument. A gap is comparatively simple: people want something, you make it, ideally better than anyone else. An argument is harder, because it means convincing people that “there is something here that isn’t being seen yet,” and getting them to see it takes time she still has to fund while she waits.

“You also need to be careful about falling in love with your own argument. Being right isn’t enough.”

Eva, Founder, The Garden of Eva

At some point, she says, “the market has to do something because of what you’re saying. Buy something. Stock it. Put it on a menu.” There is a second risk she names just as plainly: that the market simplifies her back down to whatever is easiest to grasp. “If you sell sauces, you’re a sauce company,” she says. “If BBQ is the bit people recognise, suddenly you’re doing BBQ.” She keeps the underlying claim bigger than any one jar: that the American South holds a collection of diverse, rich regional food cultures, Louisiana, the Lowcountry, Appalachia, Gullah Geechee and others, that Britain has barely begun to explore on their own terms. What comes next, products, chef collaborations, foodservice contracts, workshops, licensing, is still open. “The jars are proof that the idea can become something people want,” she says. “They aren’t the whole idea.”

Anyone considering the same kind of business, she says, should ask themselves three questions before they start. If you’re right, what becomes possible? What would have to happen for you to accept that the market doesn’t care enough? And, “probably the most important one,” can you make money while you wait for everyone else to see what you see?

Where Eva Is Now

Thorne is currently focused on foodservice: getting The Garden of Eva’s multi-use products listed on menus and into catering supply chains in Britain, the channel she now considers the more durable route to the recognition her argument needs. Alongside the products, she is developing programmes to support hospitality operators. She continues to make the regional case in public. At Mission Kitchen’s Mission Market, she argued to food buyers and corporate new product development and innovation managers that “barbecue” has become too broad a word to be commercially useful, breaking down the distinct Black American, Tejano, German and Czech, and cowboy traditions inside Texas barbecue alone as an example of the specificity the category is missing. The Garden of Eva’s longer-term ambition, by her own account, now includes new media projects, among them a podcast, Pantry and Provenance: Southern Foodways with Eva Thorne, which she is recording now. For now, the nearer test is whether British foodservice buyers will treat a jar of Creole-inspired mustard the way they already treat a jar of Dijon: as a pantry ingredient with a place of origin worth naming, not a novelty with a story attached.

Thorne is candid that the two halves of her project, the argument and the business, pull in different directions. One asks for patience. The other has to make money while the patience plays out. “I think you have to be stubborn about the argument,” she says, “and much less precious about what it turns into. That’s probably the job. It’s more an art than science.”

The Eva Thorne Playbook: Building a Business Around an Argument

Build for the pantry, not the plate edge. Design products that work across a menu, a dressing, a glaze, a marinade, a sauce, so operational trust travels with them, not against them.

Move from occasional to regular use. Get out of the edge-of-plate condiment slot and into the centre of the plate, where sales are faster and repetition builds the brand.

Sell the tub, not the jar. A branded jar sells a story to a consumer. A catering tub on a professional kitchen’s shelf sells the argument to the trade, one menu listing at a time.

Don’t fall in love with being right. An argument only becomes a business when the market does something because of it: buys, stocks, lists, commissions.

Stay stubborn about the idea, loose about its shape. Let the products, the collaborations and the offer keep changing. Protect only the argument underneath them.

From the Diary of Eva Thorne

Eva Thorne is a London-based founder and the founder of The Garden of Eva.

“Southern food doesn’t have a quality problem. It has a price ceiling.”

Editor’s Note

Eva Thorne is building a food company on the back of an argument most in her industry have not made out loud: that the vocabulary used to describe Southern US cooking has quietly capped what British buyers will pay for it. She holds the claim to a historical and commercial standard, tracing it through kitchen technique, chef purchasing behaviour and her own product decisions rather than leaving it as sentiment. Her products are the test case, not the point. Executives Diary features her for the discipline of that distinction, and for a case that food professionals in Britain are still working out how to answer.

Executives Diary, Editorial