Pastazerts: A Chocolate Ravioli & Dessert Pasta Company.
- KLS
- Jul 1
- 10 min read
For the 196th feature of our "Together Talks" campaign, we collaborated with Pastazerts and Founder, Stephanie Berwick.
Chocolate Ravioli: Where Dessert Meets Innovation.
Experience the perfect blend of rich chocolate dough and luscious creamy fillings - a dessert innovation that delights with every bite.
"Together Talks" feature # 196: Pastazerts presented by KLS - Your Trusted Shipping Solutions In The USA
Can you reflect on a goal you set, achieved, and how it made you feel? Goals for upcoming year + Next phase of the company?
What were your concerns to transition to starting your own business? How have you dealt with being the face of the company?
How have you grown due to becoming an entrepreneur? What aspect of entrepreneurship do you appreciate the most? Share a decision that you made that was detrimental? What is your why?
Story of how it was created?
I started Pastazerts in 2023. It was kind of a part-time experiment, back two years ago now. I had the idea of chocolate ravioli actually a decade prior to that for a World Food Championship cooking competition in Vegas. It was a lot of fun. I was in tech for a long time, fintech, and my background education is accounting finance. I spent a lot of time there. My day job was my day job, but I love to dabble and stay busy and kind of ended up in amateur cooking competitions for a little while there.
Chocolate ravioli brought me to the World Food Championships in Vegas two years in a row. You have to win your way. All of those things were for fun, I didn't take it seriously, instead just to have fun. Fast forward about a decade, post COVID feeling that kind of itch to maybe make a change and leave tech.
First I had to see if the chocolate ravioli is something that people like. I decided to test it in the backyard markets in Queens where I live. It was a test of customer feedback perspective and those things. That kind of brought me through the end of 2023, just testing the market a bit. Then a year and change now, February of 2024, I did leave my fintech role and went full time on the business.
What separates you from your competition?
Chocolate ravioli, just to describe it first and foremost, it's actually very simple, but most people don't know what it is. We've infused cocoa powder into pasta dough, and that creates an outside kind of vessel, as I like to call it. That allows us to put in sweet, creamy fillings, pretty much whatever we want. Right now we have a strawberry cheesecake, we have a peanut butter and jelly, and we have some teaser products coming along too.
There is a differentiation here, inherently, organically. No one is doing a specific chocolate ravioli today. Our two main sales channels, they're all wholesale, are food service and retail. We don't do a ton of direct to consumer because it is a frozen product, so our focus right now has been retail up until pretty much around this time. And I'm now developing our food service channel.
On the retail side, if you walk down the frozen dessert aisle, you have a lot of ice creams, you have a lot of frozen yogurts and the pops. I would say we're really competing against the cheesecakes, the frozen cakes, the frozen puff pastries and those types of things. I think we complement ice cream. We complement a frozen yogurt serving together like a brownie sundae, replace the brownies with the chocolate ravioli. On the retail side, we definitely have competition, but it's pretty light because no one else is doing this type of product in the dessert aisle.
On the food service side, that's really getting to the operators. We can offer them something innovative and different for their menu. It's more the sale and just brand awareness, getting the the chocolate ravioli out there, not even maybe my brand name, but just kind of getting the folks that want an innovative food item on their menu and helping them understand what it is.
What have been the biggest challenges?
I come from FinTech, as I've probably mentioned a few times now, and not knowing CPG, not knowing really food business in general. My husband is a chef, and he's been with a very large organization for 20 years. But, you know, CPG is very different than obviously working in a kitchen and a cafeteria. I would say not knowing how expensive and hard frozen is, that was a big challenge for me. It still is every day. We want to sell direct to consumer, but we can't as much as we would like to. Also, getting folks to understand what we are solving. It's great that it's innovative, but that almost is a double-edged sword for us. We have to do a lot of demos, a lot of tastings, a lot of sampling. Just being in front of people and spreading my time as much as can as a solo operator. And now we're kind of looking into fundraising.
Goals for upcoming year + Next phase of the company?
Currently, we're in 250 retailers, mainly New York City-based. Our radius out along the East Coast, all the way up to Vermont, down to about Virginia. Right now, our distribution is East Coast. The next milestone is 500 retailers along this East Coast and then to go national before the end of the year. That's the retail side, of course. We are seeing really good data up front early. We recently launched with our distributor in January of this year. Its now been four or five months and we're seeing excellent reorder rates. I think we're doing something right there. We plan to take that and multiply the doors that we're in, being in the natural category. We're going after retailers like Whole Foods and Sprouts..
Then on the food service side, I'm actually very excited about developing that arm of our business. I believe this is a great product that chefs can put their own spin on. It's almost even better to sell to them because they can kind of make it their own, as opposed to a consumer grabbing ravioli off the shelf and bringing it home and making it at themselves. I'm really excited about both of those. It's really cool to see your product on the shelf, for sure. But I'm also equally excited about working with chefs.
What were your concerns to transition to starting your own business?
I don't think I had a concern about, can this be a career. I was very excited to become an entrepreneur. After working for large and medium sized organizations for so long, it's always going to be funding, right? Can we pay our bills? Can we pay our mortgage? And how long, will our savings last? How much are we putting into the company as well? The plan is bootstrapping until you can't any longer. But it was very exciting.
When I first launched, I was reading a book, and I think it said something like, "Start somewhere, just take the most baby step that you can." And I think that was the spark for me just to get a tax ID number and get some of the foundational pieces up and running. I was still managing a full-time job. I was an executive in tech and which was a very demanding schedule. Trying to fit this in on the side meant a lot of nights, a lot of weekends. From there, it was very clear that this product has traction. Obviously, we have to put a lot of work into that. But like I said, towards the end of 2023, I was starting to really feel pretty confident about the 2024 outlook for pasta desserts. So I took that leap of faith, pretty soon thereafter.
What have you learned since becoming an entrepreneur?
I took a lot of skills from the time I spent in corporate worlds and those roles were around business development, partnerships, customer success, and customer service oriented. I knew that I wanted to make sure that those were all transferable and I embedded them into this new company as much as I could, as I'm operating alone.
But I think learning what works in tech maybe doesn't work in CPG, along those lines. Also the planning, unit economics wasn't really something I had to deal with in tech. It just wasn't the model that we worked under. From there was making sure my cost of goods sold is very accurate or as accurate as can be and making sure I'm planning down to that particular unit cost, but also what does it look like in six months. The planning, financial pieces, the unit economics, those were a little new to me, but having an accounting background, it wasn't that hard to understand. Now it's building out the forecast model of path to profitability. I had to learn some of that as well, because it just wasn't part of my prior career.
What is the next thing you need to develop?
It's a lot more PR and honestly, hiring folks that can help me with the day to day. Because I am managing every aspect of the business from working with my 3PL on orders that come through our website, every time we have to ship something, making sure that they're good, very minute, granularity of that role where it's operational. I'm doing prospecting and sales and account management for the retailers we're in, as well as the food service side we're developing. For me, it's finding folks that can help and bringing them on. Finding obviously the right people at the right time and delegating some of that work as well. That will allow me to fit into where my skill set is really great.
How have you dealt with being the face of the company?
It's been kind of an easy path in terms of that piece. Again, pulling from my prior experience in business development, being kind of customer facing. I've been on stage at the company, speaking at their annual users group in front of 500, 700 people. That piece kind of comes naturally at this time. After many years, I enjoy that. Now, I enjoy doing pitch competitions. I enjoy being on stage, being on these types of venues. Also, just networking in general, that comes kind of simple to me. But it's the real operational piece, working with a contract manufacturer, going to see the factory and making sure I'm following all the rules. Confirming that there's quality assurance on the product, that is very new to me. I'm definitely learning a lot in that arena.
What aspect of entrepreneurship do you appreciate the most?
Setting your own schedule and being accountable. Some days that's better than others, but I would say, not having to answer to anyone but myself, ultimately. Building the right people, the right team around you helps that indefinitely. But I enjoy that piece, knowing I get up in the morning, or even on a Sunday night, I'm setting my schedule for the week. And I'm excited about "going to work", whatever that means every day. Because it is different every day. That was always part of my personality, even in corporate worlds, every two years, I would kind of get that itch of I need to either change roles or just do something a little bit different. This really puts a spotlight on that type of life. Your day, heck even sometimes an hour is different, than yesterday, for sure.
What is your why?
At the end of the day, I just love feeding people. It's always kind of been something I enjoy like entertaining, hosting Thanksgivings and having dinner parties. I really enjoy when people like my food, even though I never kind of went down that chef's path. But this is that to the extreme. Creating something completely new, completely different, and then seeing it on consumers' face when they kind of grasp the concept of what a chocolate ravioli is, but haven't tasted it yet. Usually there's questions, questions on their face and lots of questions verbally. What is chocolate ravioli? Then once they taste it, I love that delight, just the way their face lights up. It happens in a way that they never knew this existed before and are pleasantly surprised. Knowing that is something I created, is pretty special.
Favorite way to enjoy your product?
Frozen.
Which is very funny, because for food safety purposes on our packaging, we do have to say warm them up. Because they are cooked in the production process, but not enough for us to say it on the package. You can literally eat them frozen, my husband likes to say "like a bonbon, old school. But, you know, it's really preference, these are very versatile. They are cooked in production. And it's really the inside filling, you don't need to cook.
It's really the outside dough that just needs that part cooked to it. I love to eat them frozen, not maybe out of the out of the freezer, five minutes, de-frosted, so you're not going to break a tooth. Then there is kind of that room temperature, if you let it sit out even longer, it gets a little more gooey and soft. Then warming them up just completely changes the entire texture. I love putting them in the air fryer because they get a little crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside. Just three different experiences and such versatility, makes it so fun.
Do you have a moment that brings you the most joy?
There's a couple. I think the one that really sticks out and I've talked about it recently, so it's probably top of mind. About a year ago, I reached out to a retailer that's a medium-sized chain around here in New York. And I grew up going there as a child, they had a petting zoo. I was just this experience going food shopping, the ultimate experience for a kid. I was self-producing at the time. My husband and I were still in the commercial kitchen. We had just gotten our new packaging and we had a few accounts, a few local independents.
This was a seven store chain and I reached out on LinkedIn to the buyers within a few minutes, I had a response.
Within 10 days, I had our largest purchase order to date. Not to date any longer, but it was humongous for the time.
Piece of Advice
Surround yourself with mentors. That really applied throughout my career and throughout my life, honestly.
But this entrepreneurship journey, especially as a female, especially alone, you really need a good network of close people around you that you can call for a problem solve or just having a bad day. Having that network of people you trust who may be friends, but really need some experts in the business as well, especially CPG. I find that is just so crucial and so key for me. And pay it forward. I mentor as well with whatever I've learned over the two years, my way of giving back.
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Community Callout
Kate Labrosse - Naturally Network
She's part of the Naturally Network board. She's a board member and they're launching a new community. I was in their fellowship and we graduated in March. She was amazing and has been ever since.
In Closing
KLS wants to thank Pastazerts and Founder, Stephanie Berwick, for today's "Together Talks" feature. Follow along for their journey with their social handles below!
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