Holy Land opened in Minneapolis in 1987 as a storefront cafe that sold tubs of hummus as a sideline. Back then, Americans didn’t eat a lot of hummus. A staple of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, hummus was long relegated to health food stores and “ethnic” aisles of markets. More recently, though, Americans seem to have decided that this low-fat, high-protein snack with a little olive oil stirred in is not so exotic. Industry giants have joined the market, for chips require dips. In 2008 Frito-Lay North America, a division of PepsiCo, became an owner of Sabra Dipping Company, producer of more than a dozen hummus varieties, including one with salsa.

Fifteen years ago, hummus was a $5 million business led by a smattering of companies. Today it dominates its sales category, called refrigerated flavored spreads, which has more than $325 million in annual retail sales, according to Symphony IRI Group, a Chicago market research firm. Sales are up more than 18 percent in the last year, it said.

Ripple effects have been felt on American farms, said Peter Klaiber, marketing director for the U.S.A. Dry Pea and Lentil Council in Idaho, which researches and promotes chickpeas.

“Ten years ago, we shipped 90 percent of chickpeas out of the country,” said Mr. Klaiber, who keeps a tub of roasted red pepper hummus in his refrigerator. “Now we only ship 40 percent. That’s all because of our new American appetite for hummus.”

Image Fatima Wadi with her sons, Majdi, left, and Samer at Holy Land, their store. Its flavored hummus is sold in the Midwest, but the family plans wider distribution. Credit... Stephanie Colgan for The New York Times

Mr. Wadi said his mother helped create that appetite.

“ ‘Eat, eat, eat. Taste, taste, taste,’ that’s all my mother knew how to say,” Mr. Wadi said, recalling the early 1990s, when Fatima Wadi was in charge of production and sales of Holy Land hummus. “She worked the street festivals, the gay and lesbian parades. Everywhere she went, she went with a tub of hummus and some pita.”