His Daughter's Birthday Dinner Sparked The $100M Carbone Sauce Empire

Eric Skae was running Rao's — one of the most iconic pasta sauce brands in America — when his daughter told him she wanted to go somewhere else for her birthday. Not just anywhere: Carbone, the red-sauce Italian restaurant that had become the hottest reservation in New York. "It's the place for my generation," she told him. "I've already been to Rao's with you." Five years later, Skae has turned that generational insight into a sauce brand that has surpassed $100 million in retail sales, landed in 30,000 stores, and deliberately abandoned traditional advertising in favor of a strategy built on earned media, events, and a single borrowed philosophy from the restaurant: dinner is the show.