From a Food Truck to a Category Defining Brand

When we first met Jesse Konig and Ben Johnson, they had just graduated from Wake Forest University and were starting a food truck called Swizzler.

At First Run, our thesis has never been about chasing trends from a spreadsheet. It has always been about customer obsession. Find what people genuinely love in real life. Watch what they choose when they have infinite options. Then test, refine, and double down.

Jesse and Ben understood something instinctively that many founders miss: people do not just buy food. They buy comfort, nostalgia, joy, convenience, and trust. The best founders obsess over those emotional moments and then build products that earn repeat behavior.

As Swizzler grew from a food truck into restaurants, one thing became increasingly obvious: fries were broken.

The frozen fry category had become a race to the bottom. Ingredient decks filled with additives and seed oils. Products that never tasted like the fries people actually wanted. Consumers were increasingly looking for simpler ingredients and better quality, but nobody had truly rebuilt the category around that demand.

Jesse and Ben saw the gap before most people did, and the opportunity was much bigger than a restaurant business.

They understood that if you could make restaurant quality fries with real ingredients and deliver them at scale, you could rebuild an iconic American category around how people actually wanted to eat. That insight became Jesse & Ben’s.

At First Run, we spend a lot of time talking about “making things people want.” It sounds simple. It is actually incredibly difficult. Most brands build in conference rooms. The best brands are built by founders who pay obsessive attention to what customers actually want.

Jesse and Ben had already spent years watching customers eat. Watching what people ordered twice. Watching what families wanted for dinner. Watching where quality expectations were rising faster than the market supply.

The thesis was not theoretical. It came directly from the customer.

That is why we invested.

Today, Jesse & Ben’s has become one of the fastest growing brands in frozen food, growing over 1,100% in 2025, and expanding nationally across retailers including Target and Whole Foods Market.

But the real story is not just growth.

The real story is that this company started the same way many great consumer businesses do: founders obsessing over customers, spotting a real gap in the market, testing relentlessly, and having the conviction to go all in when the signal was obvious.

This is exactly why First Run exists.

We back founders early when they see something the market has not fully caught up to yet.

Sometimes that starts with a food truck and a funny shaped ‘swizzled’ hot dog. 

Sometimes it turns into a category defining company.