Hello, and welcome back to Inc.'s 1 Smart Business Story. Two friends launched a pasta company with $30,000 and a homemade dryer built from an old refrigerator. Today, Sfoglini makes 10,000 pounds daily using Italian bronze die machines, a laborious, expensive method most American manufacturers abandoned decades ago. 

Their collaboration with a podcaster who declared "spaghetti sucks" created a viral sensation that sold out in 20 minutes and landed in Time's Top Inventions. But now, with tariffs driving up costs 15 percent and customers cutting back on premium products, founder Scott Ketchum faces an impossible choice: abandon the painstaking craftsmanship that made Sfoglini special, or risk pricing himself out of business entirely.

In this story you’ll find:

BY HANNAH WALLACE, CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Born at the tail end of the last recession, Sfoglini is navigating the twists and turns of the current economy amid the founder’s steadfast commitment to doing things the hard way.

When Scott Ketchum set out to create American-made, premium pasta, he had no idea just how challenging it would be. 

Ketchum and his friend, co-founder Steve Gonzalez, came up with the idea during an economic downturn. In 2012, Ketchum was working as a creative director at a design agency, and was ready for a change. Gonzalez, who had worked as a chef at celebrated Italian kitchens such as Vetri in Philadelphia and Roberta’s, Hearth, and Frankies Sputino in New York City, had recently moved back to the Big Apple after opening a pizza place in Philadelphia. It was his dream to open a small restaurant featuring hand-made pastas. He asked Ketchum to help him with his logo and business plan.

“But in 2012, we were in an economic slowdown, and the cost of opening a restaurant in NYC was astronomical,” Ketchum says. That’s when they decided to start a business together making wholesale pasta. At the time, there wasn’t any American-made premium quality pasta. They each had some savings—$30,000 total—and with that, they bought a $10,000 pasta extruder and rented a 700 square-foot space in the old Pfizer plant in Brooklyn, which other food makers were starting to populate.  

“We thought, All right, this is where we’re gonna give it a shot,” Ketchum recalls. They christened their new company Sfoglini, inspired by the tradition of the sfogline, the women in Emilia-Romagna who have mastered the art of making pasta by hand. They made their pastas with imported organic Italian durum, which many consider to be the best flour for pasta. Their facility became a pasta lab of sorts, where they could tinker with new shapes and types of wheat. Initially, they sold fresh pasta to Tom Colicchio’s restaurants, the Mandarin Oriental, The Peninsula, and the St. Regis. But as they grew, things got more complicated.

The old Pfizer building was ideal for many reasons—it had a full loading dock, freight elevators, and a community of other food makers. To save money, the duo rigged together a pasta dryer from an old refrigerator. “We built a walk-in in one of those Pfizer rooms and worked with a construction team on adding heating and humidifying elements,” says Ketchum. Pasta drying is an art, but amazingly it worked. “We were able to start the business that way. But it was too risky, we realized,” he says. (Pasta needs to dry evenly otherwise you’ll get breaking in the pasta, or it’ll be too wet at the ends.) After nearly three years, they finally invested in a pricey Italian-made pasta drier. 

In 2018, they outgrew their space and moved to a 37,000-square foot building in West Coxsackie, New York, in New York’s Hudson Valley. Eventually, they were turning out over a dozen types of pasta, including unusual flavors like kale penne, turmeric reginetti—both of which won Good Food Awards—and the viral hit Cascatelli—a collaboration with two-time James Beard-award winning podcaster Dan Pashman. 

Read the rest of the story here.

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