This week Pasta ‘Cuz had it’s opening night to students. Leading up to Wednesday we were doing last minute problem solving and getting excited. We decided to hire a person specifically for delivery, and we found the perfect person in our friend Tony. It was reassuring to have a third hand to help. On Tuesday night we had a trial run and made two servings of pasta with our tomato basil sauce and our pesto sauce. We worked out how much sauce and pasta goes into each serving and how we would operate out of our small kitchen space. We were excited but so nervous for Wednesday. We spent most of the day precooking pasta and spreading the word about our business. Before we knew it, the website opened for orders at 11 pm, and our crazy night of preparing pasta began. Within the first 9 minutes, we had received over 40 orders. Our success was bittersweet – we were overwhelmed and unprepared to take on so much business. We cooked frantically for 2 hours, fulfilling about 85 orders, and were sprinting around delivering until 2 am. On Thursday we made three main goals for next week: faster delivery time, larger serving sizes, and a fork with each box of pasta. Although we weren’t able to execute all those goals for every order on Wednesday, we are excited about knowing exactly what we need to do to get there. We have decided to precook not only pasta, but boxes of already sauced pasta. We will begin taking orders (but not deliveries) an hour earlier, and tape forks to each pasta box. A few other roadblocks have presented themselves to us: first we need to find a larger kitchen space that is licensed, and Pasta ‘Cuz needs to become a legal entity. We are currently tackling those challenges and are excited for a more prepared week next Wednesday! 

-Grace Leonhardt