These last two weeks of Pasta ‘Cuz have been really crazy.  Last week, we had not yet secured the kitchen in Summit and reached out desperately to our friends to use their cooking spaces.  Thankfully, a few generous souls offered up their stoves and ovens and we carted all of our supplies down the hill for a night of cooking.  We had spent the previous week working on legal issues and a new marketing scheme to try and increase our order numbers.  We definitely got some interest, but our order numbers stayed around 40.  On one hand, we were really happy with this number.  We were able to execute flawlessly and a lot of the orders we got were repeat customers, which we know is a really good sign.  However, we knew that we could handle a larger number of orders for the next week.

We began to brainstorm ideas of how we could break into another sector of the market.  Eventually, we decided on offering free samples in the union on Wednesday afternoon.  This allowed us to put faces to the name “Pasta ‘Cuz” and also peaked interest of people walking through the union.  A fair number of people stopped to try our pasta, and it seemed to be an effective method, because our order number rose up to 50 this past week.  We are still brainstorming new ideas to continue order growth in the coming weeks.  

In terms of a kitchen, we found out last Friday that Davidson has reworked their legal roadblocks and we are able to use the kitchen at Summit! This is great news, but means that we still have much more to do.  We submitted the LLC formation papers and are still waiting to hear back on the status of our future company.  We also met with a representative from Summit to discuss the expectations from us as a business using their space.  Once we are able to get in contact with the right lawyers and insurance agents, we should be able to get in Summit right away.  These past two weeks have been so crazy, but we have also made huge strides forward in multiple sectors of our business!

-Maggie Spiller