How does a local condiment connoisseur get Jersey families to break up with their favorite brands of mayo and mustard? It’s not easy, but Michael Leffler has proved he knows how: with tip-top products, attractive pricing and humor. And if you’re wondering what’s funny about condiments, you haven’t seen the TV commercials for his Mike’s Amazing brand’s mayo and mustard.
Leffler grew up in a condiment-making family. His grandfather, Seymour Unterman, built Supreme Oil Company, which imported olive oil and packaged vegetable oils—the main ingredient in mayo, and “good oil makes good mayo,” Leffler says.
As founder and owner of Saddle Brook-based Chefler Foods, he markets mayo and other products with his own name on them. His mayo, mustards, vinegars and vegetable oils (corn, canola, soy), on supermarket shelves only since 2017, have become fierce competitors of old-guard national brands. Chefler Foods bottles more than a million and a half gallons of oil a week for supermarkets and food-service businesses, and some of it goes into Mike’s Amazing mayo.
Leffler didn’t intend to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. He went to college in New Orleans and was set to start law school after graduating in 1991, but his grandfather offered him a good summer job at his company. “I fell in love with food manufacturing and the business world,” he says.
He joined Supreme Oil full-time and started to run the company in 2000. After his grandfather’s death five years later, the family could not agree on who owned what and how to do things, so Supreme Oil was eventually sold in 2016, and Leffler no longer had a company to run.
Still, this intrepid entrepreneur felt he was only getting started. He found a promising industrial site in Saddle Brook and built a factory there within a year. “We took a huge risk, but there was no doubt in my mind that we’d succeed,” he says. Incredibly, all his key employees at Supreme, people he needed to run a factory, came back to work for him.
Leffler chose his new product’s name because he’d learned that consumers want foods that come from people, he says. “That’s the Mike’s half of our name. The Amazing half is the promise that this Mike guy makes to customers. It gets potential purchasers interested.”
And Leffler kept his promise to make amazing products. It’s the only way to grow a food business, he maintains. (Aside to home chefs: Mike’s Amazing canola is the flavor-friendliest, most neutral cooking oil I’ve tried.)
When the pandemic came in 2020, Leffler was prepared. His factory’s railroad extension made raw oil deliveries easy, and his in-house truck fleet delivered the final product seamlessly to supermarkets and wholesale businesses. Other brands suffered severe supply-chain problems, but, he notes, “our products were there on supermarket shelves.”
Mike’s Amazing built strong brand recognition in its Philadelphia-to-Boston core market and has achieved a nearly vertical sales graph.
Some of that sizzle is sparked by the ingenious commercials cooked up by Leffler with a little help from Madison Avenue’s mad men. The ads starred New York City kid Michael Rapaport last year, and now feature Livingston-raised Jason Alexander this season. He’s hysterical playing all the characters, including both halves of a randy couple and a sassy waitress with a moustache.
The ads are mini-movies with a real New York-New Jersey attitude and sense of humor, says Leffler. “People identify with them. They’re about the choices you make every day about seemingly unimportant things that make your life a little nicer, like the mayo on your sandwich or the mustard on your hot dog.”
Another form of visibility powers this New Jersey brand’s meteoric rise. Leffler, a lifetime Yankee fan, has a permanent Mike’s Amazing billboard behind first base at Yankee Stadium. His company is the official supplier of mayo and mustard to the concessions at Yankee Stadium, which sell over a million hot dogs annually.
Mike’s Amazing also supplies the Mets’ Citi Field, the Rangers at Madison Square Garden, the NJ Devils at Prudential Center in Newark, plus 10 other stadiums including Fenway Park, home of the Yanks’ arch-rivals, the Boston Red Sox. Closer to home, the company sponsors Rutgers’ athletic teams.
All in all, legions of Northeasterners “have a soft spot for Mike’s Amazing,” says Leffler. “They feel that this brand with a real name has a real soul.”
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