A Venture Studio Built The Sausage Project to Crack a Sleepy Category. It’s in 1,670 Walmart Stores a Year Later.

The Sausage Project moved into 1,670 Walmart stores across 48 states in May 2026, its first placement in mass retail. The brand’s three fully cooked chicken sausages, Classic Roasted, Italian Herb, and Melty Cheddar, sit in the refrigerated case at $5.97 a pack, based on in-store pricing reported by Tasting Table. That Walmart entry anchors a wider expansion the company announced on June 9, which it says will carry the brand past 3,000 doors nationally by the end of July, with 842 Kroger doors and other grocery accounts filling out the rest. The Walmart figure is the one that matters here, because the brand launched only in May 2025, in roughly 280 specialty grocery doors across three states.

The Brand Was Built In A Test Kitchen, Not A Garage

The Sausage Project did not start with a founder and a family recipe. It started inside DFG Ventures, the Los Angeles venture studio behind goop kitchen and Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings, whose partners Nathan Tan and Donald Moore went looking for a category that had seen little real innovation and settled on chicken sausage. Moore reached that judgment with some standing in the kitchen, having previously served as chief culinary officer at The Cheesecake Factory. To build the product, the studio turned to Chef Kirk Gilbert, its head of culinary R&D, who came up through fine dining and hotel kitchens and ran menu research and development at The Cheesecake Factory, where Moore was chief culinary officer. The two reconnected at DFG and began building the sausage in 2022. The line that reached shelves in 2025 uses a technique the company calls Flavor Studding, which works visible pieces of white meat, cheddar, and herbs into each link, and the company says each link carries 12 to 13 grams of protein with 35% less fat than the leading chicken sausage.

A Single Hero Product And An Everyday Price Did The Heavy Lifting

For a Walmart supplier audience, the instructive part is how the brand compressed the usual climb from specialty grocery to the mass meat case. It led with one hero category rather than a broad lineup, paired it with a chef-credentialed product story, and priced it to fit Walmart’s everyday-low-price shelf. At its 2025 specialty launch through Kroger-owned banners, a 12-ounce pack carried a $6.99 shelf price. At Walmart, the brand has been listed at $5.97. The two are not a precise like-for-like, since the Walmart pack size is not confirmed, but the direction is clear enough: the brand entered Walmart at an everyday-low-price level rather than carrying a specialty premium onto the shelf, which is the tradeoff a first-party supplier weighs to be in the case at Walmart scale.

This is a first-party story, and the distinction is the point. Refrigerated, perishable sausage does not move through Walmart Marketplace or Walmart Fulfillment Services, so The Sausage Project sits in the case as a direct, sold-by-Walmart vendor, not a third-party listing, and a Marketplace seller cannot copy the path, because the category is shelf-based and temperature-controlled. It reaches Walmart.com as a store-fulfilled item, available for pickup or delivery in the areas around the stores that stock it rather than as a nationally shipped product, which is the normal pattern for refrigerated grocery. As an unprepared grocery meat item, it is SNAP EBT eligible, like the comparable chicken sausages stocked around it.

The growth figures come from the company, and they describe momentum into the channel more than proven movement off the shelf. The Sausage Project says it is on track for 10 times its 2025 sales in 2026, that it shipped 12 times more product in May 2026 than a year earlier, and that it has shipped more than 445,581 pounds to date. Those are sell-in and shipment numbers, reported by the brand, before a full year of Walmart sell-through exists.

Sell-In Got It Into The Case. Sell-Through Decides If It Stays.

Shipment momentum gets a product into 1,670 cases. Repeat purchase keeps it there, at a price near six dollars, against incumbents with decades of shelf equity and a Walmart shopper who reads price first. A venture studio can engineer a product, a price, and a launch calendar. Whether it can engineer a second purchase is the question The Sausage Project’s first full year at Walmart will answer.

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