We recently connected with Angelle Scardino, Jeff Scardino and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Angelle Scardino, Jeff Scardino thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

Dips Kitchens serves dips and only dips. A concept inspired by an old family tradition — an all dip Christmas Eve dinner. Every year, Jeff’s Italian family gets together in his small hometown. Food is shared while opening gifts and revealing adolescent stories his parents never knew about nor wanted to know about. The menu consists of all homemade dippable foods: jalapeño and pimento spread, pepperoni balls with marinara sauce, shrimp cocktail with special sauce, cookie cream dessert with cookie dippers, and the star of the show: his mom’s famous cheese ball with assortment of crackers.
Eating dips for meals is something we have always done, before girl dinners was a thing and before Martin Short’s character in the Hulu show Only Murders in the Building who only eats dips for dinner. And we’ve met a lot of people over the years who eat the same way. So we knew it would resinate.

Originally the idea was going to be a brick and mortar spot in New York City, where we lived for twelve years. But we ended up leaving NYC when covid hit and moved to Atlanta. That’s when we switched the idea to a mobile model because post covid Atlanta became one of the top work from home cities. So we thought, what if we could come to people in a new and innovative way. And what if we could cut out the high delivery fees that third-party delivery apps charge.

After talking with a lot of companies and researching a lot of different vehicles, we ended up partnering with one in New Jersey to create a street-legal version of an Italian tuk tuk that was powerful enough to get up and down the hills in Atlanta. The fleet is outfitted with a custom back that has temperature control technology to store our dips, so we could drive around like an ice cream, but carrying gourmet ready to eat dips. People can wave us down or order through our custom location based app.

New unique way of eating, check. New unique delivery model, check. Now we just needed to find a notable chef to create an original menu. And that’s when we found Whitney Otawka, who is an award-winning chef, most recently of the prestigious Greyfield Inn on Cumberland Island. She’s appeared on Bravo’s Top Chef, and was also named one of Star Chefs’ Rising Star Chefs. She has spent time working with acclaimed chefs such as Hugh Acheson, Linton Hopkins, Dan Barber, Thomas Keller, and others. We pitched her the idea and she loved it. Now the rest is history.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Jeff’s background is in creative advertising with over fifteen years of experience building brands working at the world’s top advertising agencies. His work has won every industry award and has been featured by media outlets worldwide. He was also named one of the thirty most creative people in advertising by Business Insider and by Print Magazine. He has worked on brands in all different categories and has created work in all different mediums. He is most proud of the work he has done for brands who have never traditionally done great work. Like the award-winning health initiatives he came up with for Aetna, the insurance company. One anti-smoking campaign where he used a study found that every cigarette you smoke takes 11 minutes off your life, and created a campaign for Aetna that aimed to change the way people think about quitting smoking by focusing on all the great things you could do in life with 11 minutes. He started by building a machine that gave you a memorable 11-minute experience for the price of just one cigarette. The campaign received over 7 million online views and made it onto national television.

Over the years in advertising, he has come up with a few ideas for clients that made him pause and think, “This could actually be a great business idea.” So he always was intrigued with the idea of becoming an entrepreneur, he just needed something he was passionate about.

Angelle is also a Creative Director who has worked over 15 years in the industry. After a few years of working with big agencies, she joined a smaller shop, where she was head of Art Direction and Design for over a decade. There, she launched many startup clients and helped rebrand some bigger brands too. The model of the agency was unique where she partnered with many clients not only for their design and creative needs, but was integral in business and marketing strategies.

She became versed in every angle of a business, from website design, UX and UI, CRM strategies and platforms, social content development and strategies, media strategies, production, etc. All of this experience comes in handy when you’re launching a new innovative idea.

Being both the Creative and the Client for the first time when launching Dips Kitchen was challenging. We wanted the concept to be both fun and elevated. Our retro design inspiration came from the fact that the chip and dip duo began its rise to popularity in the 1950s. From there the identity spring boarded. Our colors are retro, yet modern, as well as our fonts. We did our own take on retro patterns for each dip for the packaging. When outfitting the dip mobile trucks we made the interior look like a 1950s kitchen with cabinets painted in bright orange automotive paint to look like vintage refrigerators complete with horizontal latch handles. We also did not want to shoot our dips like typical food shots. So we created 1950s house party scenes, where each of our signature dips were showcased in a different room.

How’d you meet your business partner?

We met in Atlanta at portfolio school, which is basically grad school for creative advertising. Angelle was in the art direction/design program and Jeff was in the copywriting program. We hit it off immediately and spent the next two years helping each other with school and partnering together on projects. We eventually moved to NYC together where we lived in a small studio apartment. After surviving a few years living on top of each other, we decided to get married because if you can make your relationship work here, you make it work anywhere. Another 10 years in New York and 3 kids later, we came full circle and moved back to Atlanta.

Angelle has heard Jeff talk about an all dip restaurant for over a decade. So she was delighted to help finally get it off the ground. We worked together on every aspect of the business from menu creation to brand building and design. Being the creatives and the clients was challenging at times. But overall it has been a fun process. We’ve done smaller projects together in the past, but to build something together that is truly our own is special.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We had a custom location-based app built that allows you to track our fleet of Dip Mobiles. When you place an order, they come right to your door with mouthwatering dips. The app has been a bit of a headache. We have both built custom digital experiences before, but nothing this robust. There’s a customer app and a driver app that communicate with each as well as an admin dashboard that oversees and controls everything. The amount of bugs we’ve had to work through set us back a bit, but we are finally catching our groove now.

We also offer catering through our website and sell some on third-party delivery apps like Uber Eats. This is something we hope to phase out because the fees and commissions are too high. But since our fleet of Dip Mobiles are only able to cover an area of Atlanta, we need to use the platforms to create a bigger footprint.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.dipsdipsdips.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dipsdipsdipskitchen/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dipsdipdipskitchen
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@dipskitchen http://www.angellejuneau.com http://www.jeffscardino.com