The Art of the Limited Edition Pickle Drop

Talking with the owner of Kaylin + Kaylin

I’ve been a professional wrestling fan my entire life, and I can count the number of times I’ve found myself hyped about a wrestler like Maxwell Jacob Friedman (aka MJF) on one hand. He’s a heel in the best sense of the word: cocky, brash, crooked, he is merciless with the audience, he’s a great wrestler, and most importantly, to me, he’s Jewish. He’s a Jewish guy from Long Island, and that’s his whole schtick. And since he’s become Must Watch for me, it also means I’m easily swayed by his product endorsements. So when he showed up to a press conference a few months back, after an especially intense match, and he was ripping pickles from a company I’d never heard of called Kaylin + Kaylin, swearing up and down they were some of the best he’d ever had, I had to know more.

“I’ve known Max since he was a little kid. To be honest, he's always been kind of an asshole. I love him,” Scott Kaylin tells me over the phone about his celebrity spokesman.

Something I like about Kaylin is really the same thing I like about MJF or any great wrestler, and that is he understands his schtick. And I don’t mean schtick in a bad way. In fact, having a schtick is more vital than ever given the glut of crap out there. A schtick isn’t bad, but there are embarrassing, tiresome schticks. A good schtick, on the other hand, is knowing who you are, the story you want to present, and a deep, unwavering belief in what you’re doing. If you have a good schtick for whatever it is you’re trying to get people to pay attention to, and whatever that thing is high quality, then I believe you’ll rise above the sea of bland and boring

And Scott Kaylin believes deeply in his pickles. The word “best” comes up a lot in our half-hour conversation. But the thing is that it’s not about how he has the best pickles in the world; he actually describes what he sells as “a good product.” It’s the experience he’s having that’s the best.

“We stayed during COVID, we were open six days a week, about eight hours a day. I stayed there myself and it was probably one of the best things I ever did,” Kaylin says about his pickle-tasting bar at the Original Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles.

Here’s the thing that I like about Kaylin, his pickles, and what he’s doing. First of all, they’re very good pickles according to my West Coast sources. Two friends I trust only have Kaylin + Kaylin pickles in their fridge now. I trust these people and their opinions. They’re both in L.A., New York transplants who are both big Langer’s fans, and they swear up and down that between a couple of old, iconic delis, the newer bagels place like Courage that are actually as good as people say, and now a great local pickle brand, they feel almost (almost) like they have what they left behind in NYC, food-wise. I will tell you one thing I’ve learned in life is that the opinion of a former New Yorker out in L.A. when it comes to food is worth taking very seriously. That’s not a dig at L.A. at all. It’s a great place to eat. But there’s a reason why there are great delis, bagels, and now pickles out there, and that’s because a lot of people move from here to there and they miss certain things.

I mention all that because this is where I admit I trust these two people and their opinions because I don’t have any thoughts of my own on Kaylin’s pickles. Simply put: I can’t get them. They sell out too damn fast. Kaylin + Kaylin’s pickles are to the fermented food world what any given release from Air Jordan or Aimé Leon Dore are for people that spend too much time looking at fit pics on Instagram: an event. Kaylin + Kaylin have figured out how to crack the limited edition drop market for pickles. And, yes, part of it is selling pickles people love. There aren’t that many pickle-makers out in L.A. It’s sort of an untapped market. But it’s also thanks to TikTok and Instagram. Big accounts like The Hunger Diaries started picking up on what Kaylin was doing, and things started blowing up.

“For our e-commerce,” Kaylin says of the way things used to be, “I would go in on a Monday, pack all the orders and we would go out, and then eventually it was two days a week. Now, I've got an entire year's worth of orders.”

So he came up with an idea “because if I just open up my website, it’ll put me out of business,” since filling so many orders is next to impossible given the fact that Kaylin + Kaylin is still a small operation. But Kaylin, who is 59, spent decades in the fashion industry before his second act as a pickle man, he looked to his past for inspiration. “We come up with the idea to do these restock drops like a sneaker company. So we put up a day and time and I'm like, I don't know what's gonna happen. And the first time we did it, it was 11 minutes and I had to shut it down. Then we did it a month later and it went down to nine minutes and we had to shut it down. So now we do these drops once a month […] it's not hundreds of orders, it's thousands of orders and it's insane.”

One of the things that got me interested in the limited edition pickle drop is the same thing that got me driving on a cold day out to Westport for the Pop Up Bagels limited bagel drop. Yes, Pop Up Bagels have been called the best bagels around by more than a few people who know bagels, and that alone had me curious. But, just like Kaylin + Kaylin, there’s a schtick. A good schtick, and there’s schmear involved. The bagels are great, but people might go through them week after week because the cream cheeses change. Since I’m sort of a schmear purist (plain cream cheese, my mother-in-law’s homemade version, or butter is fine for me), I had to be won over by the bagels and, well, I’m a fan. But I also bought into the whole drop thing to get them. I saw some were still available, I put in the time I wanted to get them, which was early in the morning since I had to drive an hour north for the pickup, and I was impressed. Damn fine bagels.

And that’s really what matters. A schtick is a schtick, but I think for too long, the schtick most people had was “I’m going to elevate this thing,” they would make something that should be simple, like a bagel or pickle, and they’d tell you all the artisanal this and that, and it would be a whole thing. And if you know me, you know I hate a whole thing. I just want it to be good. I don’t need fancy, weird flavors crammed into a jar with some old-timey logo on it that was created on a computer in 2015. I don’t want a pickle or bagel elevated. I just want it to be really good and I want to know the person making it cares.

Kaylin gets that. He puts his face out there. He’s got the Long Island accent that puts me at ease that, yup, this guy really did grow up eating and loving pickles as he tells me. He cares about the product, but he also understands this is 2023. You need to get out there and make people care about what you’re doing. He mentions the pickle-tasting bar he has at the farmer’s market again.

“There's always gonna be haters out there and people who don't like stuff, but for the most part, the love that we've received from the public, about what we're doing and, seeing the small business flourish, it's just been amazing.”