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In the hands of Meet Tha Saints co-founders Asia Carter and Alliah Smith, their compound butter flavors, and the business they’ve built, are both anchored in love.
Partners in business as well as in life, the duo met and later formed Smith & Carter Catering Company in January 2017 to further explore their passion for food and to blend their Northern and Southern styles of cooking while also working in their respective careers.
“We actually got together over our love of food,” shares Smith, a native of Newark, New Jersey. Carter, who has familial roots in New Orleans, agrees, noting, “It was like a match made in heaven.”
Smith’s professional background is in education, but credits her zeal for cooking to her late mother, a phenomenal home cook.
In contrast, Carter comes from a generational line of chefs. “We owned restaurants and bars in New Orleans back in the day. We’ve really come through a lot of different key parts of this culinary world.”
A Flavorful Solution
Currently residing in New Jersey, the duo created a menu for Smith & Carter Catering Company that showcased their distinct regional cooking styles. But the rigors of their culinary business soon began to take its toll on the couple.
“We started doing private chef gigs, going to homes and preparing meals for couples and families to bring that restaurant experience,” relates Smith. “We were lugging all this equipment and I was like, ‘Okay, we need to figure out a way to cut down on all this that we’re carrying.’ So, we ended up doing different compound butter flavors to go along with whatever we were cooking.”
Carter adds that cooking with compound butter flavors not only helped cut down on the cooking equipment and ingredients they carried to clients’ homes but also added amazing flavors to their dishes.
“Compound butters are basically a butter base that has your seasonings or whatever you choose to put in it,” Carter explains. “You shouldn’t have to add too much to it. So, it’s the easiest thing in the kitchen for a professional chef, for a home cook [to use]. You can do whatever you want with these butters.”
“We ended up giving them away as thank you gifts to our clients,” relates Smith about their compound butter flavors, the first of which was the Cajun Garlic flavor. “And people started to ask, ‘How can I get this? I need this.’ And that’s how it all came about.”
A Shift to Focus on Flavor
Once the pair saw how popular their compound butter flavors were, they decided to concentrate solely on it. So in November of 2017, they morphed their business from Smith & Carter Catering Company into Meet Tha Saints, a compound butter company offering small-batch butter flavors crafted in a commercial kitchen in Irvington, New Jersey, and available online.
In 2020, Smith resigned from her full-time job to work exclusively on Meet Tha Saints. In the meantime, Carter continued her social work career full-time while running the compound butter company.
As the first Black-owned and LGBTQ-owned butter company, Meet Tha Saints currently offers eight flavors in their original line ranging from Cajun Garlic and Scampi to Jerk/Rasta and Sundried Tomato.
In addition, their newly launched Grand Luxe Crewe Collection features two sophisticated flavors worth a closer look. “These butters have edible 24K gold flakes in it,” details Carter about the 24K Opulence flavor and the Royale Honey Butter featured in the luxurious collection designed to provide an elevated dining experience.
Smith says, “We wanted to have something for everyone. That’s our goal when we created Meet Tha Saints. So along with our regular butters, we also created a vegan line. Right now, we just have the vegan Cajun Garlic available, but we’re going to be dropping all our flavors in the vegan line.”
She shares they use plant-based butter— made with coconut oil, avocado oil and nutritional yeast—to create a super creamy texture and amazing taste. “We’ve actually tricked people; they thought they were eating regular butter and it was actually the vegan butter.”
Butter Fat is Key
But what makes Meet Tha Saints compound butter flavors stand out beyond the amazing taste is the star ingredient itself. The duo’s signature products are made with “double A fat butter,” a type of butter that boasts a significantly higher fat content than regular butter, resulting in a richer, creamier flavor and texture. In addition, watching the salt levels in their butter is also an important part of their quality control.
“It all butter, it’s no oil. It has healthy fats in it, vitamin A, vitamin K. It’s a healthy fat, so it doesn’t have the extra additives in it—the oils and all the other different things that you find in the butters that’s on the market now.”
Supporting Each Other in Business and Life
But building a business and a life together is never without its challenges. The engaged couple was dealt a blow via a health crisis. “I was diagnosed with glaucoma in 2023,” says Carter, who stepped away from her social work career and began a full-time commitment to Meet Tha Saints.
“I was a social worker for 13 years and basically my career had to come to an abrupt stop and everything just changed. So we’re picking up the pieces. It is just really going well. We’re working off our strengths, and the butter business is something we can do with our eyes closed.”
In a turn of events, the entrepreneur says the glaucoma has enhanced her sense of taste. Carter shares, “Even though it’s a disease [where] you won’t be blind tomorrow, you can kind of see a little difference over the weeks, the months, the years. So yes, I will say that my taste buds have intensified.”
Smith shares, “I actually went back to work to fund this business because I was out for about three years. Asia gave me the opportunity to resign from my job and just work on Meet Tha Saints full-time. That’s what I was doing until she came down with her unfortunate disease that took her out of work. And so now I went back to kind of pick up the slack until Meet That Saints gets to where it needs to be.”
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Going Beyond Just Compound Butter Flavors
With a name like Meet Tha Saints—a moniker that gives a nod to Carter’s family NOLA roots (and the city’s football team) and acknowledges their upbringing deeply rooted in the traditional Christian church and community—the pair has plans for giving back.
“Philanthropy is definitely part of the DNA of the business,” points out Smith. “We have on our vision board [to] eventually have a home for disadvantaged LGBTQ kids to have a nice place to lay their heads and where they’re safe. We want to have different cooking classes and life skill classes there. We’re actually in the process of working on starting our nonprofit.”
Carter and Smith also recognize the hard path entrepreneurs travel when starting and growing their business. “As Black women living in the urban community, it’s hard to get capital funding and different things. We’ve really funded the business on our own,” reveals Smith.
To that end, the pair put their business knowledge and the lessons learned along the way in developing and bringing to market their line of compound butter flavors in the book, “The Retail Playbook From Dream To Display.” Set for release in May, it’s available for pre-order on the Meet Tha Saints website.
“We should try to help each other,” points out Smith about giving back and giving a hand to other entrepreneurs. “So any information that we have, we share it.”
For more information and to order Meet Tha Saints compound butter flavors, visit their website. For recipe ideas using the butter and brand updates, follow along on social media.
