The Sauce On The Side
At Buenas and Super Bien, CPGs and hospitality go hand in hand for Chef-Owner Melissa Stefanini.
photos: Alexander zeren
“Buenas” is a greeting—spoken when you visit your neighbor’s house or stop by your local bodega. It’s a familiar, warmer hello. From the beginning, Buenas and Super Bien’s Chef-Owner Melissa Stefanini had one goal: to bring her brand into people’s homes in order to make cooking more fun and easier. “We always thought [the name] was fitting because the vibe we set out to create is one that feels like home, like hanging out with your best friends,” she says.
With a background in advertising, Stefanini started making empanadas with a former partner, Sebastian Galvez, in Los Angeles. The empanadas—inspired by the ones Stefanini enjoyed growing up in Miami with her Agentinian family—and their side sauces, quickly became popular in her office.
After moving to Boston for another job in late 2013, Stefanini did empanada pop-ups on the side, but it was the sauces—from chimichurri to dulce de leche to pebre—that kept people coming back for more. As demand grew, Stefanini moved to CommonWealth Kitchen to bulk up production and apply for the necessary wholesale licenses. It was then that her CPG (consumer packaged goods) brand, Buenas, was officially born.
Every step of scaling up Buenas was a lesson in asking for help and aligning herself with other people who knew more than her. First was picking jars and coming up with labeling before learning everything else that goes into packaging, like batching, pricing, and sourcing— “it actually matters if you find garlic for 50 cents cheaper a pound.”
“People were like, you have to jar this, but they don't know what it takes to actually get a product on a shelf,” she says. “[Adding] another SKU (stock keeping unit) is basically another two years of leg work.”
A foundational decision as she started scaling her CPG business was to hyperfocus her brand. If Buenas is all about sauces that make cooking at home easier, then Stefanini needed to demonstrate how her products could fit within the lives of her customers.
First, she brought the warmth and versatility of the brand to the label. “On the packaging, I list ideas for how to use them—without being prescriptive—since the idea is that the sauces serve as an excellent base for starting a whole host of recipes.”
But, having eye-catching, cohesive packaging is only part of the process. “What matters most is the substance behind the thing you're making. People can see through any flashy gimmick.”
chef-owner melissa stefanini
Super Bien Empanadas
To display the full picture behind her brand, Stefanini opened her 165-square-foot store, Buenas, in Somerville’s Bow Market in 2018. Selling fresh and frozen empanadas with the Buenas sauces, in addition to pre-made empanada dough, offered a way for customers to see and taste the product in action, and then grab a jar of sauce to take home.
The next progression of the brand was Super Bien, a grocery-market and cafe in Brighton’s Charles River Speedway, which opened in 2022. The 30-seat storefront, about triple the size of Buenas, is a continuation of the brand’s story. The store, lit up with neon lights and decorated with Argentinian flags, sells all the Buenas products, and more importantly, showcases dishes made with them.
“We always considered Buenas more as a line of products versus one product on a shelf. I want you to take away that Buenas is so versatile. This is my brand, but I want that to fit into your life. Here's this whole menu of ways that we are using it, but what would you do with it?”
Stefanini takes her customers along for the ride with a larger menu, a wine bar (exclusively featuring South American wines), and a carefully curated grocery store
She says Super Bien is like, “a sampling station you can party in.”
For the market, Stefanini brings in products that work in tandem with the Buenas goods—for example, the Buenas Chimichurri mixed into ricotta goes well with the selection of charcuterie. Stefanini also sells curated snack bundles that emphasize their “official unofficial mantra: Have Snacks, Have Fun.” Every product is hand-selected by Stefanini and the majority comes from small businesses owned by other first-generation or third culture individuals.
Her final takeaway about growing her business, despite not having a kitchen background, is to try to have fun while doing something different.
“If you're doing something truly different, people might not immediately understand the space. It's going to take time and trust to let it breathe and come into itself. One of the biggest lessons I've learned is that just because you don't fit into a category doesn't mean that it's not worth doing.”
