We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Chelsea Lisiecki a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Chelsea, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

We had an idea to start an authentic, bronze extruded dried pasta company, so first we started in the kitchen. While Mike had been making pasta for decades, he never learned to dry pasta. After tons of research into the thermodynamics of drying pasta and plenty of trial and error, he built our first custom pasta dryer in our home, reverse engineering the instruction manuals of commercial dryers as best he could. We nailed the process in our home kitchen, and we were ready to hit our farmers market to start. This of course glosses over the myriad other small details – what type of bags to use, designing our labels, sourcing our ingredients to scale and so, so many others.

We started selling our pasta on a very small scale alongside our small farm’s organic vegetables at our nearest farmers market. Our market season started in early May, when there isn’t an incredible diversity of vegetables ready for harvest. Dried pasta would be Mike’s contribution to our otherwise fairly sparse market stall. And it sold itself so fast week after week. We’ve grown a lot since then, both literally and figuratively.

Launching our business at the farmers market was a way to dip our toes into the water, receive feedback, and ultimately get resounding confirmation that our community would support a local pasta company prioritizing organic, American grown grains. We continued selling this way for three seasons, at one point doing three markets per week. Mike was still working a full time job. It became clear that we hit a ceiling and found ourselves entering this sort of middle scale that was difficult to accommodate by renting commercial kitchen space, the seemingly most practical next step.

Issues at hand were that we needed to scale up in a big way to really grow. That meant specialized (and very heavy) pasta equipment that no commissary kitchen would have or would allow to be kept on site. Further, our drying process can take 2 days or longer, so renting by the hour was not an option. We explored some less conventional ideas, but ultimately started looking for a space of our own with a few non-negotiables: we needed access to 3-phase power, reasonably easy access for loading, not more than 15 minutes from our house, and nothing too large (because that meant $$$). We took advantage of the low interest rates at the time and were ready to go it alone. These logistics aside, the loss of Mike’s dad, Louie, in 2020, was the truest reason for us to scale the business and take the next big leap.

One building fit the bill, and we negotiated a lease with the building owner. This was in 2021, the height of the pandemic, and it took our relatively simple kitchen buildout nine months to complete, most of that time spent waiting on permits while the world came to a standstill. At the time, it seemed like way too large of a space, and we were concerned about rent. Now, we’re bursting at the seams. Producing in our new commercial kitchen meant that we could also serve fresh pasta and offer other retail goods to accompany. So we reinvented our dried pasta company and have become better known for our fresh pasta counter. We have a small Italian style market attached to our production kitchen that is brimming with our favorite foods to accompany the pasta, mostly from other very small producers like ourselves. We also now have a dedicated sales outlet for our farm’s produce when in season. Of course, we make more dried pasta than we ever imagined, too.

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

We are Chelsea and Mike, the founders of your friendly neighborhood pastificio and market in Dexter, Michigan. At Carosello Pasta, we make pasta. No frills, just small batch, bronze extruded pasta either available fresh on site or dried low and slow for our own store and growing number of retail partners.

Mike has been making pasta for decades, first as a young child taught by his great aunt Mae in the separate “pasta cucina” in her basement. Years later, he honed his technical skills in culinary school in Firenze, Italy and in many Italian kitchens and restaurants in the states thereafter. His life has centered around making and sharing food. I also grew up with most family gatherings centered around my Italian grandmother’s cooking. I also operate a small vegetable farm called Sideoats Farm, and together we’re so proud of the real good food that we’re able to provide for our community.

We have really high quality standards, both for ourselves and for every product we offer in our market. We stand by everything we sell. We are constantly searching for the smallest, most sustainable producers here in Michigan as well as abroad in Italy to share with our customers. We geek out about our ingredients and the foods we carry, and we hope that enthusiasm is tangible to our patrons. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about them. We want to share with them a food system that is transparent and authentic, unlike our industrial food system that is strategically opaque and full of exploitative practices, whether they are harmful to the earth, our bodies, or our farmworkers.

We want to tell you all about the certified organic farms growing the grain in our pasta, the lovely families who mill them into flour, and about us as pasta makers and purveyors. We want humane treatment of animals used for the eggs and ricotta in our ravioli. We want to tell you all about the single estates from which we source our REAL extra virgin olive oil. We want to share farmers’ stories, and for these values to be held high in our community.

Our hope is that we can capture not only an audience who already cares about these things, but to influence those that simply arrive for good pasta but perhaps haven’t considered the deeper implications of our food choices. Many of us get on this journey of exploring traditional foodways and end up railing against the industrialized food system, but we all have to start somewhere. The highest praise would be that our little pastificio is that somewhere, even if it’s just for a small fraction of our community. And hey, if it’s just about good pasta for the majority of our shoppers, that’s great, too!

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

In a couple words, authenticity and approachability. Starting at the farmers market, where you’re directly selling your product (and in some ways yourself) to your customer, we quickly learned the importance of expressing our passion for what we do and just being our authentic selves. Some of our first market customers from 2019 are our weekly regulars to this day in 2024. Some have become good friends.

While we like to think the pasta speaks for itself, the truth is that human connection is of equal importance to building a loyal customer base. So, we put a lot of effort (though it comes naturally) into fostering a welcoming environment in our shop. Through our first year in business, it was generally one of us as owners on the counter, and since then, we’ve really tried to instill the importance of maintaining a high level of customer engagement with our small but mighty team.

We are firm believers in food as a vehicle for building community, so we’re pretty much always talking about it. We never want to come across as the gatekeepers of authentic Italian cuisine or suggest how people should or shouldn’t eat – we don’t care if you mispronounce the pasta names, and we don’t care if you stray from the classical pairings of pasta shape and sauce. Our shop is a judgment free zone, where we’re all just really excited about eating good food. I think that has built us a reputation based not only on the quality of our products, but as a small business as a whole. People want to support small businesses, and showing them that we’re worthy of their dollars as humans, not just pasta makers, goes a long way.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

Yes! Mike spent many years in restaurants before landing a career in a large, national organic grocer for better job stability and hours. We started Carosello Pasta as a side business, sort of nestled within our farmstead that was also just getting off the ground in 2019. We started bringing dried pasta along to the farmers market with our vegetable and native perennials. The pasta was so well received, Mike was juggling his full time job alongside a farmers market schedule for quite a while.

We started making pasta with virtually no equipment, just the small manual pasta machine he’d been using the last twenty plus years. He’d be making pasta for hours in order to have a few dozen bags to take to the market. It’s easy to think of each time we scaled up equipment-wise as our key milestones, because accordingly, it meant our production capacity greatly increased and we were able to reach a larger audience.

It really began to feel like we were onto something, and that this could become a full time business if we gave it our all. For so many of us, the pandemic slapped us with this harsh realization that life is too short to let fear (also health insurance, stable income, etc. etc. ) hold us back from pursuing a life more aligned with our passions and values. Mike was spending the majority of his time working a job he couldn’t stand, while this pasta side hustle brought so much enthusiasm for connecting with food and community back into his life. Especially during such a sad time after losing his dad to cancer.

Once we opened our brick and mortar, the near immediate support took us by total surprise. We were so quickly embraced by our community and received such great feedback from other producers and retailers we really look up to. Pretty soon, we were working with Zingerman’s Mail order, a number of local retailers, and the chefs at some of our favorite restaurants. It’s been a real whirlwind! Committing to the business was probably the best decision we’ve ever made, and I don’t think we’d change our incremental start. It gave us the time and opportunity to learn how we could best serve our community, and I think we’ll still be discovering our role as small business owners in a small town for some time to come.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.carosellopasta.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/carosellopasta

Image Credits
Chris Stranad