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To hear Troy Bonde and Winston Alfieri say, if they had been smarter, they wouldn’t have been as successful as they were.
Last year, the duo, who launched Sauz, a bottled pasta sauce popular with Gen Z, and now retailing it across the U.S., sent $9,000 to a Chinese person they had never met before in 2020. Telegraph and are spoken only on WhatsApp.
Bonde and Alfieri, then students at the University of Southern California from Los Angeles, were sent home when in-person learning was canceled due to the coronavirus. The duo, just 21 and 20 years old, saw a business opportunity in the boredom of staying at home.
“We sat down together and thought, ‘What problem can we solve?'” Bonde told CNBC Make It. “And when you think about going back to a classroom with 200 students where people are using thermometer guns and sanitizing their hands and handing out masks; [we asked ourselves] Is there a way to speed up that process?”
They contacted a Chinese medical manufacturer for the idea of a combined device that could simultaneously deliver disinfectant and measure body temperature, and learned that the manufacturer was already producing one.
They obtained samples of the product and cold emailed local California school districts for pitches and demos. Soon, Bonde and Alfieri received purchase orders for nearly $20,000 worth of devices. The college students borrowed $9,000 from their parents and sent the money to a Chinese manufacturer.
Bonde calls the decision “the beauty of being naive as an early-stage founder,” while Alfieri describes it as “the scariest moment of my life.”
“Now, I would never send a nine-grand wire to a Chinese manufacturer I’ve never talked to,” Bonde said. “But we made it, and a week and a half later, two pallets landed on my parents’ front porch.”
The business, which they called NextPace Ventures, “expanded very quickly” and eventually acquired a client the size of Best Western.
“Honestly, it was the craziest business in the world,” Bonde says. “We didn’t have any marketing dollars. We didn’t have any employees. We didn’t have an accounting department. We didn’t have a format, we didn’t have a budget. We just went big for six months and continued to grow tremendously. But after three months of scaling, we realized we weren’t making any money. We were supposed to be growing at the same rate, but it was actually going to drop significantly.”
To find their next adventure, Bonde and Alfieri searched the pantry.
South is Born Allie Krockel
Alfieri and Bonde hired a marketing and design agency to create bright, colorful packaging for their bottled sauces.
While working at NextPace Ventures, the two spent most of their nights sleeping in Alfieri’s father’s office. To fuel their long days of cold emailing prospects, they made a classic college meal: pasta with jarred sauce.
During a visit to their local Whole Foods, they noticed brands like Olipop and Poppi populating the beverage aisle with bright, colorful packaging. That kind of energy, they thought, was missing in the pasta sauce aisle.
“We felt that pasta was the easiest fruit with the largest approachable market and opportunity,” says Bonde. “And we enjoyed it. It was something we knew was going to be a lot of fun.”
They decided to use the profits from their first business to launch the brand that would become Sauz.
“We put probably $150,000, honestly everything we ended up making from that business, into Sauz,” Bonde says. “We were willing to risk everything.”
To accumulate additional cash, Alfieri sold his Ford truck and Bonde got rid of his Mazda Miata.
At the time, Mr. Bonde was interning at an investment bank and Alfieri was interning at a real estate company. Their parents were “excited” that their sons would earn degrees from private schools and pursue traditional careers. It wasn’t easy to tell my family that I wasn’t going to follow that plan.
“Telling my parents that I was going to make a living selling pasta sauce was the craziest conversation I’ve ever had to have with my family,” Bonde said.
He says even his friends weren’t supportive at the time. “I knew people were laughing behind my back.”
“One of our friends, who is actually an investor in the company now, said to us, ‘I thought you guys were so stupid to start this,'” Alfieri added. Ta.
They spent most of their money hiring food scientists to develop their sauces and marketing and design firms to create colorful, bright packaging to help them stand out from other products.
Choosing the flavor was also a gamble. The pasta sauce aisle was filled with basil marinara, vodka, and creamy Alfredo. Alfieri and Bonde wanted to do something different.
They noted with interest the popularity of Mike’s Hot Honey and how the spicy and sweet toppings have become popular at pizza parlors across the country. Perhaps shoppers will enjoy the flavor of the pasta sauce.
“We wanted to trust our instincts,” Bonde says. “If I surveyed 1,000 pasta sauce shoppers, I don’t think they would have said hot honey marinara. They had never seen it. Consumers had never eaten it. So I don’t think I knew I wanted it.” It’s an opportunity to try, buy, think. ”
They decided on Hot Honey Marinara and Summer Lemon Marinara as Sauz’s first two flavors, confident that shoppers would be as excited as they are. They pitched their product to Erewhon, not expecting to hear back from the L.A. boutique grocery store chain.
Bonde and Alfieri, who call it a “see and be seen” place for consumer packaged goods brands, say they were surprised that Erewhon buyers responded to their pitch by requesting samples. Within two weeks, it was allowed to be sold in stores.
There was just one problem. There was no product.
“We sent samples cooked in our research and development facility. [weren’t even] “It probably took eight months or a year from the time we got Erewhon approved to actually launch it,” Bonde said.
“Obtaining tomatoes was one of the most difficult things,” Alfieri explains. “All the other conglomerate brands had been cutting back on tomato production for years because of COVID-19. We were trying to get some tomatoes to make 4,000 jars. .”
The brand officially launched in Erewhon in July 2023, began expanding to more retailers in January 2024, and finally landed at Whole Foods in May of this year. It debuted at Target in July, building a national footprint for the young brand and its 25- and 24-year-old founders.
Sauz’s flavor lineup includes Creamy Calabrian Vodka and Wild Rosemary Marinara. The brand, which has sought to attract customers through fun and irreverent posts on TikTok and Instagram, now sells jars that typically retail for between $8 and $10 a month, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. It is said to have generated close to $1 million in revenue.
And although they no longer sell thermometers to school districts, Alfieri and Bonde are grateful for their brief foray into medical equipment sales.
“Without that last job, Souths really wouldn’t exist,” Bonde says.
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