My two weeks at MIT are over. The time flew by. We talked to people, presented our ideas and received positive feedback. Day by day, we developed a clearer idea of our concept.

During this time, we also received our first extruder machine: our little “Monferrina Dolly”. The Dolly machine allows me to push my experiments to the extreme. The strength of the machine is such that the starch molecules of the different flours I use assume a structural role in place of the gluten. Our nutritionally balanced pasta is now at a point that was hard to imagine just a few weeks ago. It feels good to see that the months spent experimenting our flours mixes are finally coming to fruition. Our pasta has 25% less carbs, three times the amount of fibers and 50% more proteins compared to the normal pasta. The flavor is complex, nutty and sweet. It is never boring and always intriguing, like savoring a glass of red wine. When I taste our pasta I like to close my eyes as I do when I taste a newly open bottle of Chianti. Why I close my eyes only with the Chianti wine? It is the wine of my region, the one I grew up with, the wine that flows in my veins, and the only one that starts an emotional reaction inside myself when I drink it. My pasta is the same, the flavor is pleasant and very distinctive from anything else I have tried before. It is about the people that produced those flours, and of the soils that nourished those berries gently grounded in flours and powders. It represents my cooking. My Italian heritage is only the start, on top of that I add skills, experience, techniques and ingredients unheard back home, skills that I had the luck of learning during my many trips around the world. In the same way our pasta starts with the Semolina from the best durum wheat available as in the Italian tradition, but incorporates flours from different part of the world, each adding a particular nutrient and flavor to the final product. Pasta 2.0.

We run user tests and focus group to confirm that our product was what people want. We iterated based on the feedback and we will continue to do that to improve the product and adapting to the modern palate and lifestyle.

It seems like everyone wanted to be part of our testing, unfortunately the time was limited, as were our flour supplies. We got the final confirmation that we have something potentially big in our hands. Incredibly people are already asking if we can ship our pasta to the east coast. The judges of the two panels competition at MIT showed strong interested in our product and they got excited about it after tasting it. The main feedback from the two panel was: “Forget about the restaurant and go and sell fresh pasta to restaurants and groceries”.

It was not easy to defend our idea of a fast casual restaurant based on pasta, but this is what we are passionate about. We remain fully committed to start the first Italian Fast casual chain, but I won't be surprised if you will find our fresh pasta, the same that we will use in our stores, at your local supermarket or at the restaurant down the road. To give a bigger contribution to society and to help spreading a healthy Mediterranean diet among the population we have to be easily available to everyone. I envision professionals coming to our store for lunch and going to buy our pasta to the local grocery so that they can share the advantages of our products with their family once home.

Filippo

The idea of an Italian casual chain based on pasta came to us almost four years ago in Sydney. Davide and I, both tired of having sandwiches or Asian food for lunch, identified what was missing - Pasta!  After toying with the idea for over a year, we came up with a plan: we would open in Melbourne in Australia soon after finishing my PhD! However, after a year we decided that San Francisco would be a bigger market and also a possibility to realize the California dream. I had to convince Janet, my wife, that it would be great to live in California!

In November 2015, we carefully re-evaluated the location of our first store, considering only the business side of the decision without getting influenced by personal preferences. Among the different USA hubs considered, the city of Seattle emerged as the clear winner.

I had to convince Janet again! This time it took a little bit longer, but what a great wife I have, in about a week she was supportive and ready to go, again! Then, my thoughts were that we had not even started the company yet and we were already experiencing many ups and downs. I now know that those were only a harbingers of what was laid ahead of us.

Starting a company and investing every resource that you have is a big decision. Having to change continent and uprooting your family has I had adds just a little bit more "excitement" to the whole process. The path itself is an emotional roller coaster. One day you are happy, confident and optimistic. On other days, you are completely uncertain and overwhelmed and it takes a great will and effort to bring yourself out of that emotional state. Emails and phone calls become the judges of your emotional swings. You wake up in the middle of the night to check your emails for the seller's signature on the purchase offer you sent. You obsessively control your phone to see if the architect, the lawyer, the real estate agent, the advisors, the immigration lawyer, the Embassy.. called you for that update that you are longing for. It is very though, you even hear your phone ringing when no one is calling you!

We have had many bad news in these years as well as some good one. Bad news hit you like a stone in the head, they leave you stunned. You stand there, like in a coma,  unable to react for a few minutes until you rationalize what has happened. Then you realize that you need to react and you find the strength to fight back. You frame the problem, and quickly find a solution. It drains your physical energy and your soul. The good news are sadly not as powerful. They are just small achievements in comparison to the big picture. In the end, you need to believe in what you are doing and believe in yourself like never before. You can find the support of your loved ones, but the truth is that you are fighting with yourself and with your own emotions. You dream during the day; your venture becomes your dream and you no longer dream at night. If you are lucky, at night, you get good ideas that wake you up but rarely do you have sweet dream.

For those of you out there that are deciding whether to start your own company, I can only say - go for it! Enjoy the roller coaster ride! After all, the worst thing that could happen is that you learned the biggest and best lesson of your life.

Filippo

After having finish my PhD in January I took more flights than ever before in my life. Literally it was a flight a week: Seattle, Seoul, Seattle, Beijing, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur... recording a TV cooking show, setting up dueminuti, brushing up the remaining PhD work, visiting my Malaysian family… it was thrilling and exhausting.  I needed some time to stop and reflect. I had a chance to do that in March, when I spent 3 weeks in the comfort of my parent's house in Tuscany, with my wife Janet and my family all reunited again. I had to go undergo a small surgery and I took the chance of the forced relax (aka convalescence) to rediscover my culture: I talked about food with whoever I met. The older, the better.

I took cooking classes from my grandmother as a way to understand classic Italian food... and of course to get some quality time with nonna :). She is certainly not an ordinary teacher and often doesn't know why things are done in a certain way, but I could see in her methods the wisdom of centuries of knowledge. Dinners with my uncles family and my mom's untie where others priceless moment of culinary wisdom exchange.

My wife and I went to discover the Umbria region. Our plan: to taste as many traditional food of the region as we could. Coratina (innards of the lamb slow cooked on a wood fire), Castellucio Lentils, Prosciutto DOP of Norcia, Black Truffle of Norcia, Pork Liver Sausage, Roveja, grilled lamb and the finest ricotta I have ever tasted in my life. We talked with the chef of each restaurant we had the pleasure to dine at, it was definitively a fantastic experience. A truly unforgettable memory was a meal in a restaurant in the small town of Castelluccio, an old borgo at 1400 m above sea level that surmounted a plain famous in the word for lentils. Everything we tasted was speaking of that country side. Dishes were so simple and at the same time so tasteful that you could almost feel the farmers' energy behind each produce. Ricotta was of such a lightness that it was a blessing. The chef was definitively one of the best chef I ever met. There was no trace of her in her dishes: her best skill, a rare one among chefs, was to respect each ingredient, and let it shine for itself. I talked to her for quite a bit and I will never forget that the most common sentence she used was "I did not do anything special to that". She told me where each ingredient was coming from, the story of each farmer behind a particular item and how every product would fit in her cuisine.

Taking only the best ingredient was her secret, respecting them was her skill. "The greatest dishes are very simple" used to say legendary chef Auguste Escoffier about 100 years ago. We couldn't agree more.

Filippo