Eric Skae ran the best-selling pasta sauce business for the legendary Rao’s restaurant until the company was sold. Now as the CEO of Carbone Fine Food, he’s done it again—building a $100 million competitor and a simmering rivalry.
Eric Skae sits at the back corner table inside New York City’s Carbone as a plate of spicy rigatoni vodka comes out, and he pauses to acknowledge the sauce that launched his business, Carbone Fine Food.
“After 35 years, I’ve done everything you can do,” says Skae, the 61-year-old CEO and a cofounder. “But this one in particular, I did want to do it better than I’ve ever done anything else. I’ve been obsessive about that. I do nothing but think about this brand day in, day out—how do I drive this brand and where do we take it next and how big can we get?”
Skae runs the consumer packaged goods spinoff of the iconic Greenwich Village restaurant that has since launched eight outposts—including in Las Vegas, Dallas, Hong Kong and London, as well as soon-to-open location in Dubai—since it was founded in 2013 by Major Food Group. A dinner at Carbone can cost hundreds of dollars, but Skae has the task of selling more affordable access—with a $7 to $11 jarred sauce, any night at home can feel like you’re at the flagship restaurant.
That’s propelled Carbone Fine Food to become the fastest-growing pasta sauce brand in America—with sales expected to reach $100 million by the end of this year, nearly doubling 2024’s performance. It’s also why Skae is getting calls from grocers as far away as Latin America, even though Carbone has no locations south of Miami.
But Skae, who previously ran the retail business for another New York red sauce cathedral—Rao’s in East Harlem—and led its 2017 acquisition, is enjoying his second act. Carbone Fine Food’s 18 sauces, from arrabiata to pizza sauce, are now sold across 27,000 stores in America and he’s hungry for more expansion.
“When you’re running, you never look behind you,” says Skae, who lives full-time in Las Vegas and spends around 100 days of the year on the road. “I’m looking at one target. I will not sit here and say I never think about those other guys. That’s not me.”
Marinaraville: “This will be the number one brand in America,” says Skae, who believes Carbone sales will reach $1 billion. “That’s what I expected for Rao’s….and it’s number one today.”
Gabby Jones/Bloomberg
Since its founding in 2021, Carbone Fine Food has become the second-largest tomato sauce in the natural channel of grocery stores, behind Skae’s former employer Rao’s, which has revenue of $1 billion but has not been growing as quickly. Carbone Fine Food is also seventh across all retailers, behind value brands like Prego, Classico, Bertolli and Hunt’s. Skae says he won’t stop until Carbone Fine Foods has the top spot.
“This will be the number one brand in America,” says Skae, who believes sales will one day reach $1 billion. “That’s what I expected for Rao’s. And Rao’s was where we were when I was forced to sell it, and it’s number one today.”
For the past year, around 154,000 new households purchased a jar of Carbone sauce each month. Carbone Fine Food’s household penetration is still small, at around 2.7%, but Skae says he is closing the gap with Rao’s, which has 23.7% of the market share. “It’s me against Rao’s,” Skae adds. “Yet we’re both propelling this category to premiumization.”
The tomato sauce aisle was already fairly crowded before Carbone joined the fray—with $4 billion in annual sales and more than 500 brands sold nationwide. The bevy of startups that have launched in the past few years include a hot sauce extension from Truff (founded by two Forbes 30 Under 30 alums), a line from the New York City restaurant Rubirosa, as well as the Cavu-backed Sauz with $21.8 million in investor funding.
The momentum in the category is also fueled by Sovos Brands, which owns Rao’s, getting acquired by Campbell’s for $2.7 billion in 2024, in an all-cash deal. At the time, Campbell’s reported that Rao’s sales increased 37% from the previous year, generating $775 million in revenue “as it continued its march toward becoming a $1 billion brand.”
Back in 2017, Skae led the deal to sell Rao’s to Sovos, backed by the private equity firm Advent International, which rolled up Rao’s with yogurt brand Noosa and pancake and waffle mix brand Birch Benders. Advent took the business public in 2021 at a $1.1 billion valuation.
Carbone Fine Food could get acquired for 2 to 3 times its sales, but Skae says he has little interest in selling.
Forbes estimates Skae’s minority stake in the business at 5%. The rest is owned by the partners of Carbone’s management company Major Food Group—Mario Carbone, Rich Torrisi and Jeff Zalaznick—as well as one outside investor.
“Eric lives by the adage, ‘lead by example.’ There is no job at CFF that he is not willing to do,” says Carbone. “Our first goal was to build this business into a billion-dollar brand. Now that’s within sight, I want to make the Carbone brand globally recognized as the premier Italian food company in the world.”
Though Skae may be a general in the Red Sauce Wars, he is not Italian. He’s Irish, by way of his mother, who immigrated to America in 1957. Born in the Bronx, he grew up just north in Rockland County, the eldest of seven siblings who went to work at 11 years old as a golf caddy. After college, he ended up as a distributor for Arizona iced tea when it went from a few million in sales to $500 million. Skae then moved to Monster Energy drinks before being a part of launch at Naked Juice.
“When I started, it was all about being eye level on the shelf next to Snapple, backed up with quality service,” he recalls. “My mantra’s not much different for this particular brand.”
Rao’s tapped Skae in 2016 when the sauce business was struggling. The top shareholders were fighting over control of the business and Ronald Straci, a nephew of the restaurant’s founder Vincent Rao, had filed a lawsuit in Manhattan’s Supreme Court against his cousin, Frank Pellegrino Jr., who started the sauce business alongside Rao and his wife, Ann Pellegrino Rao.
“I could navigate between both parties,” recalls Skae. “They would’ve continued fighting and the brand would’ve deteriorated. We really had to solve it.”
When Skae took over as CEO, annual revenue was around $70 million. Within a year, sales had increased by nearly 40%. Skae also started the development of Rao’s products that weren’t sauce (including in frozen entrees). And then Sovos purchased Rao’s in one of the biggest food acquisitions of the decade for $415 million.
After staying on another year, Skae left Rao’s, taking on some consulting gigs until his non-compete agreement ended. Then an investor offered to connect him with Mario Carbone. By October 2020, they struck a deal, including a small equity stake in Carbone Fine Food for Skae.
It took Skae and the Major Food Group team four months and 10 recipes to bring a sauce line to market. For the first year, if Skae wasn’t on-site to taste each batch, he had every one delivered directly to him so he could try it before leaving the warehouse. He learned that, he says, from Frank Pellegrino, whose late father was the longtime ringmaster at Rao’s.
The first year, it was difficult to get onto shelves—Skae says he spent months not getting calls back from buyers he had worked with for years. But after securing space at Big Y, Harris Teeter Fresh Market and Erewhon, sales doubled by the end of 2022 to around $20 million.
“I’m showing them, you’re going to make two and a half dollars on a jar on me, where they’re making maybe 50 cents on some of their value brands,” says Skae. “They’re going to make more penny profit on this than they can anywhere else.”
Whole Foods launched the brand nationwide at the end of 2022, propelling Carbone Fine Foods to $30 million in revenue by the end of 2023. Whole Foods tomato sauce buyer Brooke Gil says Carbone’s growth was steady at the Amazon-owned retailer until this past January, when the brand expanded to five slots on Whole Foods’ shelf, including with alfredo and the limited edition exclusives truffle and lemon pepper. “That’s when sales skyrocketed,” says Gil. “Eric has always had clear vision of the role he wants Carbone to play in the category with a laser-focused strategy on how to get there.”
“They have the potential to wipe out the heritage brands,” adds Emily Schildt, CEO and founder of upstart brand retailer Pop Up Grocer. “There’s less interest in these legacy brands and there’s also less loyalty.”
But all the growth has been coming at the cost of profitability. The business is currently unprofitable, and Forbes estimates gross margins at 35%. Skae says he’s reinvesting everything he makes back into the business. And even with 15% tariffs on the San Marzano tomatoes coming from Italy, he says he’s hoping to not have to raise prices.
But Skae isn’t hitting the brakes—a new line of just-add-protein simmer sauces in cacciatore, bolognese and fra diavolo will soon roll out. “I want to slow it down a little to really focus on where we are before we take that next big growth phase,” Skae says, “but a lot of it is uncontrollable. If we continue at the rate we are, no matter what I do, growth is not going to stop. I’ve got to be prepared for that.”
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2025/09/19/inside-the-billion-dollar-red-sauce-war-carbone-vs-raos/
