When Alison Cayne looked at her community, she saw people disconnected from the joy of cooking at home.
What she couldn’t find was a way to bridge the gap between inspiration and execution. So, she built one herself.
Haven’s Kitchen was born, growing from a cooking school into a national sauce brand. Then, after a decade of building a food empire, she pivoted. She took the playbook from that experience and applied her strategy to a new sensory world, trading the art of taste for the art of scent to serve her generation of women.
She is running a playbook that proves a founder’s vision isn’t limited to a single category. I analyzed her strategy. Here’s the breakdown.
The First Win: Haven's Kitchen
From a carriage house in New York City, Alison launched a brand that transformed from a local cooking school into a beloved CPG powerhouse. Her fresh, globally-inspired sauces built a loyal following and proved that "healthy" and "convenient" could be delicious.
Before Haven's Kitchen, home cooking for many was either a time-consuming chore or a reliance on over-processed shortcuts. The options were a compromise, not a solution.
Alison saw a different path.
The Problem: Consumers wanted to eat better and connect through home-cooked meals but lacked the confidence, time, and skills.
The Insight: As an educator with a master's in food studies, Alison knew the issue wasn't just about a single recipe, but about creating community and tools that made anyone feel like a pro in their kitchen.
The Play: She created a mission-driven "triple bottom line" business, starting with a physical location to build an authentic community. As she built trust she expanded haven’s Kitchen into a line of sauces, scaling her mission from a single location to thousands of grocery stores.
The result? A nationally recognized brand that redefined the fresh sauce category, proving that a mission-first brand could achieve scale. Then challenges hit. Covid forced the closure of the cooking school, while the retail channel’s business model made growing Haven’s Kitchen to the next level impossible.
After a period of self-reflection and discussions with her investors and team, she made the difficult but necessary decision to wind down Haven’s Kitchen’s product lines.
Alison’s Second Act: From Taste to Scent
What do you do after closing a chapter on a beloved company you built from the ground up?
Starting another food brand would have been the obvious move. But Alison looked at the broader landscape of CPG and the daily rituals of women like herself. She saw a new void, not on the dinner plate, but on the vanity. As her focus shifted from nourishing the body with food to nourishing the self in other ways, a new question emerged: How can I use natural ingredients to create a daily moment of luxury and wellness for women in their middle years?
This question took her from the world of food CPG into the world of beauty and wellness. It was time to run the second-act playbook in a brand new way.
Running the Playbook: A New Sensory Venture
Alison’s new strategy is to leverage her decade of CPG experience to build a brand that speaks directly to a powerful but often overlooked demographic.
Choulie: A Focus on Scent and Self-Care
The Disruption: While the beauty market is crowded, few brands are speaking authentically to women in middle age. She is disrupting the space by rejecting the notion of "anti-aging" and instead focusing on products that enhance a woman's sense of self right now.
The Play: Her new company, Choulie (a play on the base ingredient patchouli) is a line of body oils built on two core principles: sophisticated, beautiful scents and high-quality, natural ingredients. She is applying her CPG playbook; mastery of supply chains, branding, and direct-to-consumer strategy, to a new category. The play is to create an elevated yet accessible product that becomes an essential daily ritual.
The Result: Her second act is building a new kind of wellness brand defined by sensory pleasure and targeted authenticity. Her influence is creating a ripple effect, proving that a founder's expertise is their most valuable asset, capable of transcending categories and redefining markets.
The 3 Rules of the Alison Cayne Playbook
So, what's the repeatable formula for building a second act that reinvents your career? It boils down to three core rules.
Your Own Problems Are Your Greatest Gift. First, it was her own need to make home cooking easier. Now, it’s her desire for a sophisticated, natural wellness product for her stage of life. The most powerful business ideas solve a problem you know firsthand.
The Playbook is Category-Agnostic. A deep understanding of brand building, supply chains, and storytelling isn’t limited to one industry. Alison’s second act proves that a strong CPG playbook can be successfully deployed from the kitchen pantry to the beauty cabinet.
Trust Your Senses. A brand that connects with people, whether through taste or scent, is built on a foundation of sensory experience and intuition. The data can tell you what’s selling, but only a founder’s vision can create something that truly resonates.
A finished chapter doesn't mean the story is over; it's just time for a new course. What will your second act serve?
