How Involved Is Kardea Brown Really With Her Frozen Food Line?

When a beloved chef or health-conscious celebrity becomes a TV personality, the next logical step is to introduce a line of foods in their good name. The roster of such branded snacks and meals runs deep, from Richard Simmons to Gordon Ramsay, Drew Barrymore, and more recently, from southern specialist Kardea Brown.

Brown found a love of food from her South Carolina family with Gullah-slash-Geechee roots, and she's been serving them up with a smile on the Food Network on her cooking show, "Delicious Miss Brown." In 2023, instead of telling viewers how to make a meal, she offered another option — a line of frozen meals sold at Walmart, fittingly called Delicious Eats by Kardea Brown. Initial meals included Country Kitchen Fried Chicken, Chicken Fettuccini Alfredo, Chicken Pot Pie, and Sausage and Grits. The line has been doing well enough that new entrees recently hit shelves — Chicken & Dumplings, Smothered Chicken & Rice, and Chicken Cajun Pasta.

Brown is naturally very proud of her frozen food line and enthusiastically promotes it. As she told us when we spoke to her at the 2024 New York City Wine & Food Festival, her deep involvement with the product is one of the reasons she is so proud of the line. Brown said, "I was really, really hands-on in the entire process from start to finish, for curating the recipes, to actually going to the test kitchens, working with the chefs, and then also getting samples of when they went through the assembly line."

Frozen meals that you heat up at home can be a mixed bag, which may help explain the rise and fall of TV dinners, so how does a chef like Kardea Brown ensure they closely match the magic she conjures up in the kitchen? Brown understands the limitations of frozen products and how things can go awry in an assembly line process, as she admitted, "[It's] pretty difficult to make sure that it tastes as homemade as possible." However, she applauded those who made her line a reality, adding, "I think the team has done a really great job with translating it from my kitchen to frozen."

When it comes to heating up frozen foods, everyone has an opinion, but when it comes to Delicious Eats by Kardea Brown, we went straight to the source to ask for the best practices. Brown gave two options: a microwave for convenience or an air fryer if that's an option for you. It's possible there may even be more offerings from the chef's line on the way in 2025, which is already shaping up to be a big year for Miss Brown.