Health
Hummus in Every Home
Jason Levine, Sabra’s new CMO, sees a healthy future for the food
J
ason Levine is probably the
most enthusiastic person
you’ll ever meet on the
subject of hummus.
“Hummus is really an
incredibly important
product,” he says. “Given how
healthy it is, everyone in the country
should be eating hummus.”
It would be easy to attribute
Levine’s passion for the simple
dish, a puree of chickpeas and
sesame paste, to his role as the newly
appointed Chief Marketing
Officer for Sabra, the leading
producer of hummus in the
country.
But it’s clear that Levine
doesn’t turn off his apprecia-
tion for hummus when he
leaves his office in White
Plains and heads home to
Montclair. The Levines –
LEVINE
wife Amy and daughters
Samantha, Natalia and Sylvie
— are all healthy eaters, he says,
and there are always several differ-
ent types of hummus in the fridge
(Sabra’s Salsa Verde hummus is
Levine’s personal favorite). Hummus
on toast, topped with raspberries
and drizzled with honey, is a typical
Levine family breakfast.
“I feel so great about bringing
home Sabra hummus and sharing
it with my family, neighbors and
friends,” he says. “It’s such a great
food — it’s high in protein, fiber and
nutrients, but low in sugar. It’s gluten
free. You can live on hummus.”
Levine and his wife, who put
down roots in Montclair nine years
ago after four years in London and
Zurich while he worked in market-
ing for Mondelez, formerly Nabisco,
“couldn’t be happier” to be raising
their children in town.
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“We wanted to be in a place
that had a lot of diversity,” he
says. “Also, we had gotten used
to living in villages and didn’t
want to have to drive every-
where. Finding a place that’s
not quite urban but not really
suburban was important to us.”
Levine also appreciates the
town’s accessibility to midtown
Manhattan, where advertising and
media agencies are thick as thieves.
His neighbors seem to have had the
same idea. “Half our street
is in the advertising or
marketing field,” he says,
including a strategic planner
for J. Walter Thompson; a
former CMO for Audible,
now running a startup; a
creative director for Saatchi
& Saatchi, and a digital
marketing director.
Keeping up with current
tastes Levine’s new posi-
tion at Sabra comes at a time of big
changes in the food industry. “The
plant-based food movement is one
of the biggest we’ve seen in a a long
time, and hummus and Sabra are
right at the center of it,” he says. “It
is so exciting to become a part of it.”
Hummus is experiencing “explo-
sive” growth, Levine says. Veganism
has jumped 600 percent in recent
years, he says, and more individu-
als are becoming “flexatarians” who
want to eat less meat and more plant
foods. The percentage of U.S. house-
holds that ate hummus in the past
year jumped from 2 percent in the
’90s to about 34 percent of house-
holds today, he says.
People are also more concerned
about sustainable farming, and grow-
ing chickpeas actually replenishes
the soil with vital nutrients, such as
nitrogen, rather than depleting it like
many other crops, he says.
All Sabra’s chickpeas are grown in
the Pacific Northwest, and their hum-
mus is produced at a state-of-the-art
facility in Virginia.
Right now, Sabra is the alpha dog
in the booming hummus market with
a 62 percent share. But Levine isn’t
resting on his laurels; an overarching
goal is to help Sabra elevate hummus
from a snack food to a meal. “We
want to inspire people to use hum-
mus creatively,” he says. “It’s great as
a toast, like avocado toast, great as
‘center plate,’ like a hummus bowl.
You can put in your hummus every-
thing from meat and veggies to any-
thing you can find in your pantry.”
Sabra, he says, is also looking to
expand beyond its base business of
hummus and guacamole.
Perhaps the company’s plans will
one day include a hummus fast food
restaurant business. On a recent
“hummus tour” of Israel, Levine
visited several hummusiyas, eateries
that serve only hummus.
“Down the road I could see Sabra
opening up a hummusiya in the
tristate area,” he says. “It’s a bit of
a personal passion of mine.” ■
WRITTEN BY JULIA MARTIN