Our story

Two friends, six regions, one pantry

Gusta started with a blind tasting in a New York apartment in 2019. The pantry that came out of it is what Sam and Alberto grew up eating, sourced from family makers across six Italian regions.

Overhead still life of an Italian pantry on a wooden table, jars of dried pasta, sun-dried tomatoes in oil, fruit preserves, biscotti, and an olive oil bottle.
Overhead flat-lay of six numbered bowls of plain cooked spaghetti, the same pasta cut in every bowl, on a modern Carrara marble counter in a New York apartment for a blind tasting.
2019, New York

It started with a blind tasting

Alberto set up six pastas at Sam's apartment. Two mass-market brands that advertise. Two heavily marketed "imported from Italy" brands. Two small artisan pastas that rarely make it onto US shelves. Numbered bowls, minimum seasoning, no labels. Friends voted blind.

The pasta with the biggest marketing budget came last. The small artisan pastas came first. The same pattern held when we ran it again with the olive oils, the preserves, the biscotti. The names on the shelf didn't track with the food in the bowl.

That's how Gusta got built. We went looking for the makers behind the small artisan pastas, in Puglia, Liguria, Lombardia, Toscana, Umbria, and Sicilia, and built a pantry out of what we found.

Why Gusta

What's in the jar is what's sold in Italy

Industrial Italian food is reformulated before it ever leaves the country. Sweeter, blander, dried faster, sealed in plastic that flattens whatever was alive in the original. All of it built on the assumption that nobody can tell.

Gusta is built on the opposite assumption. We pick six regions that do certain things better than anywhere else, source from the family makers there, and bring the food back without changing the recipe. Nothing reformulated. Imported direct. No middlemen.

Six regions

Six Italian regions, one pantry

Each region we work in has its own grain, its own preserves, its own way of making the same staple. This is what comes from where.

Hand-drawn editorial pen-and-ink illustration of the silhouette of Italy on warm cream paper, including Sicily and Sardinia.
  1. Puglia Sun-dried tomatoes, jarred vegetables, fig and apricot preserves.
  2. Liguria Genovese pesto, the basil it depends on, the coast in a jar.
  3. Lombardia Thick Italian hot chocolate, the northern lake country.
  4. Toscana Twice-baked biscotti, the family way.
  5. Umbria Slow-dried bronze-die pasta, the green heart of Italy.
  6. Sicilia Pistachio, hazelnut, almond, volcanic soil.
Long bronze-die spaghetti hanging to dry on wooden rods in a small Italian pasta-drying room, warm afternoon window light.
How we work

Twenty-four hours of pasta-drying, and other unreasonable choices

Industrial pasta is dried in three hours. It's a factory shortcut. It also cooks the flour, dulls the flavor, and breaks down the protein that keeps pasta al dente. Ours comes out of the dryer the day after it goes in.

Our tomatoes are sun-dried in Puglia, by the same family that picks them. Our olive oil is cold-pressed within hours of harvest. Our biscotti are twice-baked, the way Toscana has always baked them. Our hot chocolate is thick, the way it's poured in Lombardia.

None of this is fast. That's the point.

What makes a Gusta product

Three rules

  1. Short ingredient lists

    If the back of the package needs a paragraph, it isn't on our shelf.

  2. One region per category

    Pasta from one. Biscotti from another. We don't blend, we don't relabel.

  3. What we know goes on the label

    The region. The process. The time it takes. If we couldn't name it, we wouldn't sell it.