After a stint with the Yankees, Rochelle Randazzo started her own team—of pasta sauces.
In an earlier life, Rochelle Randazzo worked for the Italian America’s Cup team and was George Steinbrenner’s secretary during an exciting stint with the Yankees in the mid-’90s. “I’m pretty thick skinned,” she says of working for the Boss, “so I took it all with a sense of humor.”
With the birth of her sons—Ty, now 10, and Jack, now 9—“my real job started,” she says. Once the boys were in school, “Cooking had always been my hobby, so I figured I would try to incorporate that into some sort of business.”
Tweaking some of her mother’s recipes, Randazzo started a fresh pasta sauce club in her town of Glen Rock. “You could join for $20 a month and get deliveries of sauce every week,” she says. “I had about 60 families, almost all in Glen Rock.”
One day she met another mother whose husband worked for what Randazzo says is a well-known “national, natural foods supermarket chain” she isn’t at liberty to name. The chain was looking for a vendor to supply it with pasta sauces it could sell under its own brand. In 2009, Randazzo was invited to submit her sauces for a blind tasting against other fresh (meaning refrigerated, no preservatives) sauces. She won. By mid-2010, the chain was stocking all six of her flavors—Plum Tomato Basil, Vodka, Fra Diavolo, Puttanesca, Alfredo and Marinara-Pizza.
Randazzo’s Honest to Goodness Sauces (randazzossauces.com) was off and running. The founder found a soup manufacturing company in Massachusetts to produce her products. She took samples to the New York Fancy Food Show in 2010 and eventually wound up with Costco stocking the Vodka sauce and Shop-Rite taking Vodka, Alfredo and Plum Tomato Basil in several stores, mostly in New Jersey. D’Agostino’s sells the sauces in New York, and Kilroy’s Wonder Market carries them in Glen Rock.
The sauces have no artificial ingredients and no added sugar. “You can feel confident serving it to your family and to company,” she says.
These days Randazzo, 44, is developing a line of pesto sauces. “There are many more challenges bringing a pesto sauce to market,” she says. “It’s not actually a cooked product, and a lot of R&D needs to be done to obtain a decent shelf life.” Randazzo says she expects to roll out the pesto sauces this spring.