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Articles
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Copyright Providence Journal/Evening Bulletin July 7,2004
The Providence Journal. Providence, R.I.: July 7, 2004
Steven Catanzaro remembers with exacting precision the day he decided to go into the pasta-sauce business.
It was a Sunday and the North Providence Fire Chief and his wife, Kristen, were hosting a 15th birthday party for their son, Steven Jr. They had 50 or 60 people and were grilling lunch in their backyard. Since it was a cookout, there was no macaroni.
"My friends started coming up to me and saying, 'It's Sunday! Where's the sauce?' " recalled Catanzaro.
"So I went into the kitchen, made my sauce, and boiled four pounds of pasta," he said. "I really whipped it up quickly, so when I served it, everyone was asking me, 'So, did this come out of a jar?' "
Well, of course it didn't - it came from his own family recipe mixing fresh tomatoes and basil, olive oil, garlic and assorted super-secret spices.
But, he thought, it could come from a jar.
It took about six months before Catanzaro got up and running with all the permits and set up a commissary kitchen in Pawtucket for cooking and production. The first jars of Catanzaro's Pasta Sauce were delivered to Shore's Market in North Providence on Jan. 2, 2002.
The deal was negotiated by Kristen, sales and marketing guru of the newly formed Catanzaro Foods. As she did that day, she also makes all the deliveries.
Steven Catanzaro made the early labels on his home computer. Each features a big plate of spaghetti, adorned with fresh tomatoes, basil and two heads of garlic. He prepared, styled and photographed that picture.
"The tomatoes and basil both came from my garden," he says proudly.
"If you look closely, one of the garlic is dented a little. A professional wouldn't have let that happen," he adds, not so proudly.
But if you're a mom-and-pop operation, you overlook such tiny imperfections because you know the quality of the product, homemade in small batches, is what matters. And that is where the Catanzaros' commitment is rather amazing.
He won't let anyone else, not even his wife, make the sauce. He even insists on capping every bottle, working three nights a week and on weekends, after his fire chief duties are done.
Son Steven, now 17, and daughter Madisson, 11, help out. Madisson gets a kick out of sticking on labels. Usually they're straight.
Still, the Catanzaro family has come a long way since those days in the beginning when he used measuring cups to fill each jar. His wife laughs at the memory as she demonstrates with bare hands how he filled each one, always spilling some hot sauce on his big firefighter's hands.
"We knew there had to be a better way," she laughed.
He devised a system using a pot with a tap to fill each bottle.
While her husband was honing his pasta sauce production, Kristen decided she wanted a bigger kitchen role too. Though she seems born for the marketing gig -- holding a business degree from Rhode Island College -- as a girl she had always dreamed of owning her own cookie shop.
Now, she makes and sells two varieties of wine biscuits, Red Wine Bites and White Wine Golden Nuggets, which are sold locally in the same independent markets (Shore's, Dave's Marketplace, IGA, Eastside Marketplace, Tom's Market, and Belmont Market) as the family pasta sauce, plus the shop at Newport Vineyards in Middletown. The biscuits, too, carry the Catanzaro name (and motto, "The taste you've been waiting for." They are also based on a family recipe, that of her husband's grandmother Adele Viti.
Kristen used focus groups - teachers and staff at North Providence High School -- when she was doing substitute teaching. She left that job to cook all her own biscuits when the new family endeavor expanded to the bakery aisle in January of 2003.
She delivers as much as she can fit in a customized van bearing the Catanzaro name, that pasta picture from the label, and the number "3." There is no vehicle 1 or 2. But it's part of the pair's good humor that they are amused by their little inside joke.
"We really work well together," Kristen said. "I don't know how many couples can say that.
"Many nights, we'll even have dinner here," she said, pointing to the place where he simmers the sauce and she bakes the wine biscuits.
The couple traveled to Termini Immerese, Sicily, to fuel their passion for food. That's the town from which the Catanzaros came. His grandfather immigrated here with the family recipe for tomato sauce used by four generations of family fishermen.
In his Pawtucket office, Catanzaro's obsession for sauce is evident: He collects jars of pasta sauces by famous people, such as Frank Sinatra.
"It's very rare," he said adding that the expiration date passed years ago. "Of course, you can't eat it."
That makes it unlike his sauce, which is homemade style and apparently being used to fool families in Rhode Island. Kristen said that while she puts the sauce on store shelves -- stocking is another of her duties -- people will come up to her and say they put it in a pot and throw away the jar.
"And nobody is the wiser," she said.
Of course, her husband likes to think that people will use his sauce as a base and doctor it up to their own tastes. And they don't just have to use it on pasta, but also in fish and chicken recipes.
One question remains: Does Chief Catanzaro whip up dinner for his firefighters?
"The chief doesn't cook," said Catanzaro with a twinkle in his eye.
At least not at the firehouse, he doesn't.
Copyright Providence Journal/Evening Bulletin Mar 26, 2003
The Providence Journal. Providence, R.I.: March 26, 2003
I know two things in life, Steven Catanzaro said. Fire, and Food. That's all I ever knew.
Catanzaro has been the town's fire chief since 1998, and he's been a firefighter for over 30 years. But in the past year, the chief has gone into business on the side bottling and selling his own pasta sauce.
He's about as good a cook as he is a fire chief, said Mayor A. Ralph Mollis.
In Rhode Island, it's almost a tradition for public officials to bottle their own marinara. But Catanzaro is no Buddy Cianci. The sauce isn't called Chief's Own, and Catanzaro's mug doesn't grace the label he says he's too shy to put his own face on the jar. I'd be embarrassed for myself, he said.
Instead, the sauce is simply Catanzaro's, and the label bears a picture of a succulent plate of pasta that the chief himself photographed on his own dining room table.
Catanzaro tells two stories about his love of cooking.
One is printed on the side of his pasta-sauce jars: it's the story of his ancestors, Sicilian fishermen, whose wives would cook a hearty tomato sauce as the boats pulled in to shore.
He heard the story from the people who taught him to cook his father and his grandfather, who was born in Sicily. More recently, he said, he picked up a trick or two on a trip to Sicily, where his relatives were still cooking the same zesty sauce.
I used to make the same sauce in my restaurants, Catanzaro said.
He owned two restaurants when he was younger: Catanzaro's Family Restaurant on Smith Street, and Taste of Italy in Coventry. But he had to give them up as his career in the Fire Department grew more absorbing.
I had to make a choice between the Fire Department and the restaurants, Catanzaro said.
The other story the chief tells about cooking the story that's not on the pasta jars is about the Fire Department, which he joined at 16.
We eat well, Catanzaro said. Firefighters eat well. We're together for long periods of time, and it's like being with a family. So what do you do when you're at home with your family? You have big dinners.
In the town's fire stations, he said, companies on the night shift come in with bags of groceries and cook meals from scratch.
We don't eat just anything, he said. We make sure our family eats well.
When he started developing his sauce for mass production, he said, he had his firefighters taste-test the first few batches. They're the worst critics, he said.
Catanzaro decided to sell his sauce, he said, partly to subsidize his income, and partly to have a business he could take with him when he eventually retires from the force. The process of setting up his own pasta label took the better part of eight months.
I had no idea how to do it to begin with, he said. He had to get licenses from the Federal Food and Drug Administration, and he had to take courses in food preparation.
He also had to send his sauce to a private laboratory in Jamestown for analysis, so he'd know what to print on the label under nutritional facts.
See all that stuff on there? That's not something you just throw on there, he said. I thought it was.
The sauce is distributed by Catanzaro's brother's produce company, Annex Market Gardens, and Catanzaro cooks up each batch in a 40-gallon vat in his brother's Pawtucket warehouse.
No one is allowed to help cook the sauce. Absolutely not. That's it. I'm serious. No one, Catanzaro said. He held up a jar. See this? It's got my name on it. I have to make sure it's mine.
In the three months since his product went public, Catanzaro has been selling it to restaurants and supermarkets. The Johnston Shaw's carries it, and Dave's Marketplace has also recently agreed to take the sauce. Catanzaro said it usually sells for $3.99 to $4.99, but Shaw's was selling it for $1.99 yesterday. He's also close to finding distributors in Connecticut and New York, he said.
That sauce is everywhere, Mollis said.
In the meantime, the chief has been giving out sample jars to his firefighters, he said, and he usually carries a few jars in the trunk of his town car. But he said he wanted to be careful to avoid any conflict of interest.
When he's soliciting for his sauce, I don't even say I'm the fire chief, he said. I don't go around with my fire car and say 'Hey, I'm selling sauce.'
And although cooking the sauce is a delicate operation, Catanzaro said his duties as fire chief always come first.
Not long ago, Catanzaro said, he got an emergency call.
I was right in the middle of a vat of sauce, he said. I said [to my wife], 'Just watch this. I'll be back.' '
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