We were lucky to catch up with Laura Pelaez recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Laura thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I’ve always been a foodie, and as an immigrant one of the things I missed the most from home country was the food. Growing up in Colombia I ate a lot of arepas for breakfast, lunch and dinner, it was my mom’s and my grandmother’s go to for a quick nutritious meal. There’s no better feeling than starting the day with a buttery arepa with melted cheese and a hot chocolate, that was my morning routine for school and I loved it! Once we moved here it wasn’t easy for my mom to find arepas and making them from scratch was very time consuming as a working single mother, so she turned to microwavable pancakes and toaster waffles, as a kid I didn’t mind a sugary breakfast but it honestly didn’t come close to what I used to. So a few years ago as a working adult having trouble finding balance between eating nutritious meals that were easy and delicious I rediscovered arepas and started making them for my husband Mario and I. Making a large batch and freezing them as “meal prep” so we could pop them in the aifryer at anytime, this was so convenient! We thought this would be great to find in grocery stores so we took matters into our hands and started recipe testing. One day we made 30 packages and took them to one of Mario’s soccer games to see if people were interested in a product like this. To our surprise we SOLD OUT and our friends and family wanted more. The word started spreading we opened and instagram account and started delivering: a business was born- Kronchy

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I don’t exactly have chef experience, however as a child you could say my favorite channel was the Food Network, so I guess the passion for food and cooking was engraved in my soul. I worked in the restaurant industry for 12 years, hosting, serving, bartending and managing, as a matter a fact this is what I was doing when we started our business. As anyone in the industry will tell you the hours are crazy and living a healthy lifestyle like this is not easy, I would say this inspired me to get creative and find food alternatives that would work for my lifestyle and also feed my Colombian cravings. I find food so special because it’s something so personal yet it brings people together, all life events big or small are surrounded by food. I wanted to feel closer to my roots and share my culture one arepa at a time with a nutritious and easy modern twist, because delicious and good for you should be easy.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Oh capital, the word all entrepreneurs love and fear at the same time, and its because we all need it to fuel our businesses but its so difficult to get when your starting from scratch. The truth is you just never really imagine how much of it you need to grow your business because we’re all just figuring it out as we move forward . We started our business in 2019 with $20 and a few groceries we had at home to make that first batch of 30 packages of arepas that we sold at the soccer game, that turned into $300 and we invested back into making more arepas. We realized that this could be a business so we started saving money to buy home cooking equipment like a small kitchen aid mixer, baking trays, a rolling pin and small utensils. We managed to sell $30,000 out of our apartment that first year just through word of mouth. To this moment we had manufactured everything by hand at home and when we tried to bring our product to stores we realized that we needed to manufacture in a certified facility so we moved to a comercial kitchen where we had access to industrial equipment and bought a machine that helped us make arepas more efficiently to keep up with demand and to share Kronchy with more families in Atlanta. As we grew we had a lot of support form our customers and started meeting fellow food business owners whom introduced us to programs like Georgia Grown, the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Latin American Association, here we found a lot of resources through different grants and they have help us grow our business. The most import lesson we have learned is that is so much easier to grow in a community.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

We met at school in Mexico City while studying acting back in 2015, and started dating months after. Looking back its curious that the first time I ever cooked for Mario I made arepas. After dating for only 2 months we moved in together. As college students trying to make extra money one day we decided to sell arepas at a park, we were successful for few hours, until the police kick us out for not having a permit, sneaking around we managed to sell the whole tray, back then we didn’t know this was our future. We lived in Mexico for the next 2 years before we decided to move back to Atlanta where I grew up to pursue our acting career and make it big in the Hollywood of the south. We got married on February 2018. While we auditioned we worked in the restaurant industry and this is how we found our path to entrepreneurship. We don’t have an Oscar yet, but we have gained experience being the face of Kronchy.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.kronchy.us
• Instagram: @Kronchy.us
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Kronchy.us/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kronchy/about/
• Twitter: @KronchyUS
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@KronchyUS

Image Credits
Sebastian Tacha and Alejandra Gonzalez