Photo: Grub Street
I don’t spend a lot of time watching the Food Network show Chopped; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a full episode start to finish. (Is it still on?) But some cursory research tells me that at least once, in 2015, the show’s producers challenged the contestants to make a dish out of boxed macaroni and cheese, to take the standard combination of powdered cheese and oddly short noodles and upgrade it in some meaningful way with the addition of fresh ingredients (in this case: monkfish, Swiss chard, and Canadian bacon). This Chopped challenge is essentially the premise of Riff, a new line of boxed pasta and noodle kits “thoughtfully designed to simplify cooking from start to finish.” Riff takes the familiar form of a box of Kraft or Annie’s, and it would have completely escaped the attention of New York’s food world — and it certainly would have escaped my attention, personally — were it not for the involvement of one of its co-founders, Eleven Madison Park owner Daniel Humm.
Humm, a chef who has won every star and award imaginable for his cooking and restaurants, has historically approached outside projects with an eye toward those that reinforce his fine-dining experience: a line of tasteful Crate & Barrel furnishings, a Gaggenau sponsorship. Riff is not that, but it does fit in among the many (many) other products racing to capitalize on a current CPG gold rush, all of the fortune seekers spurred on by the success of Carbone sauce, Momofuku ramen, and Fishwife tuna. Any old-fashioned grocery-store staple can be given new life with a cheffy makeover, and most have been. The Roberta’s name has long been stamped onto frozen pizzas, Salad for President’s Julia Sherman has a line of powdered dressing, Dan Barber is tinning up fruits and vegetables like they’re sardines, Marcus Samuelsson has some jarred sauces, Noma will sell you coffee or various garums, and Via Carota’s negronis are, of course, available pre-bottled and ready to be poured over ice at home. You might think the only reason anyone opens a restaurant today is so they can turn it into a line of Whole Foods–friendly products tomorrow.
Riff is not the first product to apply this formula to mac and cheese: Canadian chef Matty Matheson sells a line of redux Kraft dinners (as they’re known Up North), and the brand Goodles makes, by my rough count, one million different flavors of boxed mac and cheese, which come in pun-loving flavors like Twist My Parm and Shell We Dance (and which are now all the property of Barilla, which bought Goodles this month). Riff arrives with Humm’s endorsement and a package that answers the question “What if Pentagram designed a Life cereal box?” Despite the shoppy shop–friendly visual language — actually handled by Center, the same team that dreamt up the design for Molly Baz’s mayo — Riff is available, for now, only at Target.
How you feel about Riff probably depends on how you feel about things like Sir Kensington’s, the condiment company that was acquired by Unilever in 2017 and whose own co-founders include Riff’s other co-founder, Mark Ramadan. Do you look at traditional grocery-store products and think, I’d like to pay a little more for basically the same thing but fancier? Have you ever used the phrase “umami bomb” in a conversation? Do you need your pantry curated? I don’t, but I was at my local Target the other day restocking the supply of freeze-dried strawberries we keep for our kids’ snacks and saw the Riff display — positioned an aisle away from all the other mac-and-cheese kits, I assume to prevent comparison shopping. I had seen the commentary on social media; I figured the charitable thing to do would be to buy some to see if this new Daniel Humm mac and cheese actually tastes any good.
I couldn’t convince my daughters to give the spicy tomato rigatoni a try — “spicy” and “tomato” being two words that more or less guarantee they won’t eat something — but I didn’t push it too hard because the other option I bought, creamy parmesan cavatappi, felt like the purer distillation of the “fancy mac and cheese” ethos anyway. (Coconut curry lo mein, sesame-ginger noodles, and garlic-lemon rotini will have to wait for another day.) Just like any other box of mac and cheese, you get a bunch of dried pasta and a bag of mysterious powder. (All of the ingredients listed on the box are identifiable as real food, which is nice.) You boil, you drain, you dump in the powder, and you stir. This particular variety also came with a little packet of crunchy bread crumbs to sprinkle over the top. True to the experience of making Kraft, you supply your own milk and butter to add to the pot. True to the experience of making something like a chef, it’s more butter than you’d expect, a quarter-stick in this case. You are, in essence, making very basic Alfredo before adding dehydrated cheese and spices instead of grated Parmesan.
The first listed ingredient in the cheese mix is buttermilk, giving it the unmistakable aroma of ranch dressing. That counts as a promising start. I decided to skip the on-the-box mix-in suggestions — mushrooms, lemon, parsley, my own grated Parm — because, as the packaging promises, “Riff is delicious right out of the box.”
Riff is not delicious right out of the box, or at least this variety wasn’t. It was salty and creamy in the way all boxed mac and cheese should be, but the spice blend included dried onion that perfumed the whole pot with an unpleasant whiff of musty astringency. Adding a squeeze of lemon and some nice Parmigiano certainly would have helped; adding a squeeze of lemon and some nice Parmigiano makes all food taste better. But I am not Riff’s target demographic. So I asked my 5-year-old how it looked. “Good,” she responded. “Do you want to have some?” I asked. “No,” she responded, firmly, before asking for an apple.
I suspect my daughters may not be the target demographic, either, and that the real audience for Riff is any Fortune 500 company looking to add a line of high-margin, premium dinner kits to its product offerings. The whole thing reads a little bit like it was created by AI and raises questions that drive me crazy the more I think about them: Doesn’t everyone already know that they can mix other, better ingredients into a box of mac and cheese? Isn’t that the whole point of boxed mac and cheese? What was Humm thinking about as he tweezered tomatoes onto a bowl of Riff at an influencer party? Why does Riff’s generic, toque-wearing mascot look like a line cook that Chef Boyardee would dismissively refer to as “soft”? And who is the harried home cook that has time to mix sliced mushrooms and fresh herbs into a butter reduction but opts to buy this instead of a $3 box of De Cecco elbow pasta?
The only question I can answer definitively is this: Would I buy it again? I don’t see why I would, although Riff did remind me of Kraft mac and cheese in one last important way. You think it’s going to be nostalgic and comforting, but the final result is predictably bland and just a little bit underwhelming.
