We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sasha Millstein. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sasha below.

Alright, Sasha thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

My aunt has been a professional caterer in NYC for the last 30+ years and we always discussed working together or taking over her company once she retired. The only problem was that I knew nothing about food, cooking OR catering. My aunt, Alicia, would then follow up and say well if you’re not going to take over the business, can you find me somebody who wants to buy my book of business so that I can sell it and have something to show for all of my hard work. Unfortunately, my aunt IS her brand in the sense that she is so successful because people LOVE working with her. So, trying to find somebody to take over her recipes and her clients just didn’t make sense. Then in February of 2020, I took the whole family on a trip to Vietnam where I used to live and while we were travelling, I heard an episode on ‘How I Build This’ about a woman who built up a chicken salad fast casual chain. While I was telling my aunt the story over lychee martinis as the sun was setting, she suggested I take one of her products and try and commercialize it and create a household brand name. So, I aske her what a popular dish was that all her clients seemed to love and she immediately exclaimed, “My chicken pot pies, of course!!!”. I thought about it for a minute and realized the chicken pot pie is the great common denominator. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor , a democrat or a republican or black or white, everybody loves a pot pie!! We got together with the family and told them about our idea and they immediately came up with a name and as soon as we landed back in NYC, we started the company and never looked back!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

After we decided to start a company making chicken pot pies, we realized that we didn’t know anything about the CPG space or what was already on the market. We needed to understand who our competition was and was there room for improvement and whether or not we could come up with viable solutions to address those pain points. So, I set out to try every single pot pie on the market over the next three months and came back to my aunt to report back on the results. The first thing we noticed was that the crust always got mushy and soggy. The bottom and side crusts were mushy because the filling would just saturate them and the underside of the top crust would get mushy because the steam from the filling. The other pain point was that it took about 45 minutes to an hour to reheat. So, we came up with a concept to address both those issues. We decided to separate the filling from the crust and place them in two separate packaging components . This would allow the customer to remove the product from the freezer and place the crust in the toaster for 30 seconds, then place the filling in the microwave for 5 minutes. When both are done, you would place the crust back on the bowl with the filling and dig in. This was the filling would come out piping hot and the crust would come out flakey and crispy and all of this would be ready in 5 minutes. As soon as my aunt saw this she immediately exclaimed, “In 30 years of doing this, I’ve never seen anything so brilliant!!” I knew at that moment that we were on to something special!

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

When we came up with the concept to sell a gourmet pot pie that you can reheat in 5 minutes, we decided to throw a pop up. We sold out of every single pot pie that weekend with so many customers asking us to open up again the following weekend. The next weekend though, the whole world shut down and everything changed. When we first started the company, we thought we were going to build a fast casual restaurant where you could order pot pies from around the world with different flavors that represented different countries and you could mix and match different crusts that would also represent the country. For example, we were going to created a souvlaki pot pie and make a phyllo dough crust for Greece. We were going to do a gumbolaya pot pie and a corn bread crust for New Orleans. We were going to do a teriyaki chicken pot pie with a wonton crust to represent Japan. But, alas, the universe had another plan in mind. The world shut down and we decided to pivot from a fast casual concept to a CPG company and instead of doing a mix/match offering of products, we had to streamline the crust and only off our famous puff pastry along with three flavors to streamline the process so that we could move forward and launch.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

I met my aunt 25 years ago when we reconnected after a long period of time when my mom and my aunt didn’t talk. I always felt like the blacksheep in the family but when I met my aunt she clearly became the missing link. She taught me so much about culture and fashion and how to travel and how to do everything in life in an upscale fashion and have fun doing it. I always wanted to be around her absorbing everything she had to say and teach me. When we came up with the concept, we assumed that we would both start and run the business together. But, as soon as we started picking out packaging we quickly realized that we both had very strong opinions and oftentimes they were very different from one another. So, my aunt immediately saw this schism and realized that the most important thing was our friendship and if we wanted to preserve it, we needed to figure out a way not to work together so closely. So, my aunt suggested that while these were her products, she was happy to hand them off to me and allow me to build Aunt Ethel’s on my own as the sole founder. And of course, she would continue to be there for me in the form of a consultant that I could call a million times a day and continue to be the face of the company and the ambassador to Aunt Ethel’s Pot Pies.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.auntethels.com
• Instagram: @auntethelspotpies
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aunthelspotpies/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aunt-ethels-pot-pies/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/AuntPot
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTmH81fhwOWQaXshaXz_tNw
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/aunt-ethels-pot-pies-brooklyn