400: Giada De Laurentiis

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0:31I want my whole line to be cohesive and for that story to really come together. I don't want a parcel. I've been a storyteller my whole life. You got to start at the beginning and tell the whole story, not bits and pieces of the story or they don't come together and it feels inauthentic.

0:50This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbarg.

0:59Giada De Laurentiis is in the studio for an all-time classic conversation. Giada is the Emmy Award-winning television personality of Food Network's Everyday Italian, among many other shows, and the author of nine New York Times bestselling cookbooks, including her most recent, Giada's Italy. On this episode, we talk about Giada's panettone chops. Man, I love Giada's panettone. We also talk about what's like running her own media company and e-com brand, Giazzi, and how her dedication to quality is making this a leading brand in food. There's so much to cover, and we get into all of it. What a great conversation.

1:35I hope you enjoy it.

1:46Giazzi De Laurentiis, welcome to This Is Taste. It's so fun to meet you. Yeah, thanks for having me. I was just saying, our mutual friend Erica has been sending over products from Giazzi for about six months. Your Panettone, like no cap, that is the best Panettone I've had. That guy Roy sent me one. I had some really good ones from Italy. Roy's is good too. It's pretty good. It's all right. But I think I'm just going to... Shots fired. No, it's not really that. But I really liked your Panettone. I was blessed with a few of them. It was great. It was the best one. I'm incredibly excited to hear that.

2:19I work really hard on these products at finding unique artisans that are making things in the traditional way. I also am really diligent about the visuals. So having come from food television where all you could do was see, you couldn't taste, you couldn't smell, nothing else. How was I going to get you in the kitchen to cook? I needed to make it visually incredibly appealing, which I think is something that Italians do anyway on their own really well. But I really wanted to make the packaging something that was incredibly visual, that made your mouth water when you saw it. Because I don't have any other way to sell you something, especially digitally.

3:03So if you can't go in store and taste like you do sometimes at a grocery store, how do you know that panettone is going to be amazing? So in your mind, oh, the packaging is phenomenal. A lot of it recyclable so you can put things in the container. Right? So you might want to buy it as a gift for a friend or for yourself or for your table because it looks amazing. And then you taste it and you're like, holy, it's amazing. You can drop S's. Now, like, I'm just going to add another layer to this. People are going to assume it's not good because, like, when you're on television, they think it's, like, just this commodity thing.

3:38So when you're selling in Jadzi, you know, you're doing a line of pastas, which you sent me as well, which are great. And like there's a lot of people who are like going to judge it harder. No question. Yeah. Yeah. I think any type of celebrity does anything, people judge it harder. The thing is about this particular thing is that I'm not just licensing my name to somebody. I built this as an entrepreneur from the beginning myself. It started as a content platform, Jodzy. Yeah. And we published it here at Clarkson Potter. Yes. Yeah. We're in the building. That was the very beginning. Then that closed up.

4:10And then I restarted it by myself and funded it alone for about four years. And then during 2020 is when I teamed up with a friend of mine who had a warehouse who imported all Italian goods and was unable to sell them to restaurants and was panicking of what he was going to do with all this inventory. And that's when I realized, oh, I should take his products, my recipes, merge them together and create kits for people. And that just took off and it continued to take off after 2020, after COVID. And that's when I started to realize, OK, I might have a viable business. So maybe I go and raise some money through the VC world.

4:51Really? Yeah, I'm on almost my third year. Did some Sand Hill Road meetings up in the Bay Area? Yes, no joke. My lead investor is two doors down on Sand Hill Road. Listen, there is no joke. It's serious business and it's quality and you're a big personality. So, I mean, bless you for making it happen. Yes, and that's a good thing. But there's a flip side to that is that, you know, I think a lot of people when I went out looking for investment were like, hmm, just another celebrity brand. I don't know if we're into it. D2C is like a little bit cooling. Maybe it's not that great. Exactly. We're not sure if the time has already passed.

5:33and there's Italy's in many parts of the country now. Why, why you guys? So all of this took some thinking and some real like creating and some heart and soul because it has been my passion for a long time. I just didn't have, honestly, did not have the time in 25 years to ever put this together. It's been an evolution. So why you guys? Let me ask you, that's the follow-up. Why should we buy your products? I mean, I just gave my anecdote of one product. No, of course. Yeah, absolutely. I think what makes us different, first of all, I'm curating them. I was born in Italy. My family still lives in Italy.

6:10And so there's a real connection to the homeland for me personally. My whole brand has been built on Italian. And I think over the 20 years, I have gained a trusted following that my recipes and my knowledge is something that people trust. And I think that's number one on the list. Number two, the products are really good and clean and are without a lot of the fillers that you find in Italian products these days because they are mass produced. Yeah, mass produced. Let's just leave it at that. You raise scale. You've got like cutting corners. Yes, yes. And also like brands, Italian brands that might still produce some things in Italy for Europe, but otherwise produce in the United States.

6:51And there's a completely different ethical situation going on there. and I think people are mistaken in marketing. Are you in the tomato world? Are you doing tomato products? So tomatoes is my next launch. Okay, I was right. So I knew you had an... So entering the tomato world... Tomatoes is a... No. Tomatoes are tough. It's very difficult. I know. It's very, very difficult. You do? How do you know? Well, I write about food and Stanislav's in Central Valley, California. I mean, those are some of the best in the world. So when you're talking about Italian, Nepali, Southern Italian tomatoes... Campania, to be exact.

7:25Campania. Right. I messed it up. No, no. I mean, Puglia has tomatoes as well. So there are other areas. Puglia's got the olive oil, which is dope. Yes, but they also have tomatoes. They also have datterini. My experience is that tomatoes in America are quite good, and it's a very crowded business. There's a lot of good products available. This is my read, but please. Yes, but there are only a few people who actually run that business. They are the ones that sell to everyone else. and the market is really dominated by a couple of people. It's not dominated by hundreds of people. All of those hundreds of people are sourcing from the same spot, if they are from Italy.

8:07And if not, they're taking seeds, and still that is a whole business on its own. And honestly, in Italy, there just isn't that much land anymore to grow tomatoes. There just isn't. There's such a mass appetite for tomatoes coming from that region that they just can't produce it. In fact, we just had a harvest where the tomatoes, they had a really bad season. Very few of the datterini and the chiligini that I really like, the pomodorini, because I'm not interested in the larger tomatoes so much. That to me, that market has been done. Are you jarring them? Yes, we are jarring them. And then we are also making sauce.

8:48But I'm looking for the baby tomatoes, the cherry tomatoes, right? Those are much harder to find. And there aren't really any sauces making them with those style tomatoes. So you make sauce with the small guys and you're doing jars with the small guys too. I mean, I'm a big fan of the Muti jar and canned small guys. But tell me about your product that you've come up with. I'm curious how you think about. Muti is actually a good brand. They're a good brand. And they are widely distributed. So that's great. I think that for me, I am looking for tomatoes specifically from Campania because of the rich soil.

9:25Yeah. Okay. And the way that the sun hits the soil, it just creates a sweetness that is sort of not easy to find anywhere else. And so for me, those are really, really special. Muti, it just depends. You know, they source for many different places. Yeah, if you're doing single origin and that's what your Jadzi's brand is about, single origin. A lot of single origin. Also with olive oils, single origin. Teaching people about the olives, where they come from, what the flavor profile is. And what is the importance of single origin? How does that work within your body? And really understanding the quality of the ingredients that you're putting in.

10:05Because pasta has gotten a bad rap for so long. And there's so many pastas out there. Some great, some not. I think that depending on where you source them from and how they're produced has a lot to do with it. How do you judge dried pastas? Because you are so right when you say there are some that are good and some are not good. But when we as a consumer enter the aisle, it's very confusing to us. We obviously are judging it by price. But how should we think about buying dried pasta? I think, you know, the thing about dried pasta is that if it's super cheap, chances are it's not really that great for you, number one.

10:40and it isn't produced in a way that your body will react positively. And I think that's one of the reasons that a lot of people have intolerances, right? I think the quality of the ingredients matters a ton. So my pasta comes from Abruzzo. It's a very small area that is very sparsely populated, right? They have a lot of wheat fields. And so they grow their own wheat and they source the water from the mountains. they do not mass produce. They don't. They can't probably. They just don't have the bandwidth to mass produce, right? It's also the process, not just of the bronze dyes, but the pressure of the dough that's going through and the heat.

11:26So in order to mass produce, you have to push out the dough at very high temperatures and then dry it very quickly. We do it at a much slower pace. So when you heat that dough at a certain temperature, it changes the chemistry. It's all about chemistry at the end of the day. The heat kills any good bacteria that might be in there. And then the way you dry it has a lot to do with it as well. So heat is slow. Heat is creating quick speed. So you want to do it slower. Yes. So you don't kill the good bacterias. And also flavor. Flavor. And texture. Well, yeah, that's right. You know, that rough texture that you feel, really, really important in the end result.

12:07Love talking about products. And I feel like this is only the beginning for you. Is there a category that you want to enter that you're just like really like puzzled about right now? Let's be honest. You're being honest with me. Well, I was puzzled about tomatoes. Yeah, no, you've. For a really long. I mean, I've been trying to do tomatoes for two years. It has been one of the most difficult journeys. Yeah. I had no idea that it was this difficult to do. I think, too, for me, packaging is so important. You know, I think because I come from a world of TV where I've had to look at the visual, and that's the way I've been selling my brand for so long, that the visual and the packaging, I've spent a lot of time as much on as curating the products themselves and sourcing them because I want to create an emotion.

12:57Yeah. That's really what I'm selling is emotions. Yeah. I mean— It's a connection, a community of emotions to the motherland, to my motherland. Yeah. And I think it all goes hand in hand. Most people do not spend, most companies do not spend much on packaging. That visual isn't quite. I agree. I mean, CPG has been way behind a lot of other industries. I mean, media is much better designed than CPG. I mean, look at fashion. Fashion. Look at cosmetics. Look at the beauty world. Much more progressive, right. Look at their packaging. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if I look at what my 16-year-old is buying, she's not looking at the quality of the makeup.

13:32She's looking at the packaging that they're marketing on TikTok. Take those ideas and put it into the DDC world in the food business. And I think nobody's really done that with storytelling, with emotion. All of those things have not come together. And that's what we're doing at Jodzy. It's different. It's growing. And you walk Expo West or Fancy Food Show, you see some brands that get it. many don't. They think they get it, but it's corny. I mean, shit is corny. Now, let me ask you about marketing products because this is a big challenge for founders is getting through the noise. You're doing D2C or are you doing retail channels?

14:06Are you getting deals from retail? Right now, we're just doing D2C. We are looking at some retail channels, but I've really wanted to keep it D2C for a long time because once you go into the retail channels, I have a harder - Your margins go away. Huh? Your margins go away. Well, it's a different type of business, really, because maybe the margins are less, but the volume is more, right? Agree. So, you know. You came correct. I'm wrong. You can make a ton of money with low market. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. With scale. Because the scale is bigger, right? But to me, the storytelling is so important.

14:39And in the past, I haven't been able to really control that storytelling as much when I've gone into retail and brick and mortar. So I really want the storytelling and the emotion and the experience to really stay connected And so I have been hesitant to do that. Yeah. But the right deal can come your way. Yes. And there have been some. I just, I'm holding out for a little longer. No, I'm into it. I like that you're standing firm. And I want my whole line to be cohesive and for that story to really come together. I don't want a parcel. Yeah, you don't want your olive oil. I don't want olive oil in one store and pasta in another store.

15:17And we're going to start tabletop. And I don't, I want everything together. This is a story. I've been a storyteller my whole life. You got to start at the beginning and tell the whole story, not bits and pieces of the story or they don't come together and it feels inauthentic. Let's pivot to your early life living in Los Angeles. I want to get to like when you're in college at UCLA. What's food like in Los Angeles for you? What's what's we talk about L.A. a lot, but I feel like I'd like to get your take on L.A. How do you think about L.A. in that era? You know, was food not that important in your life at that point?

15:49No, food was important, but I really only I cooked. Yeah. And I grew up in a family that cooked. We did not. We didn't go out to dinner the way that there was no Postmates and delivery. Right. And picking up food from a restaurant was not the thing in the 80s, late 70s when I moved here. Even the 90s, it wasn't you went to a restaurant, but I I cooked. I mean, I was known in my friend group for the ones that had I had dinner parties all the time. I liked to cook my own food. I did not love going out to eat. Having said that, I worked for Wolfgang Puck. I worked in restaurants in Los Angeles, so I didn't want to be in a restaurant.

16:27I worked there. So when I wasn't working there, I didn't want to be there, eating there. I wanted to be at home cooking. This is so interesting because I think when a chef has a career in food, you're trying to see the competition and you want to go out there. But I totally hear you because it's also a little bit of a different era when maybe community wasn't quite there as it is now. It's totally different. The world was – I keep telling people the world was different. Things really have changed at a rapid pace that most people can't wrap their heads around. But for people, millennials, they don't understand.

16:58I grew up in a different L.A. than what you know now, right? We didn't have that sense of community. Yeah, there were there restaurants there. There was California Pizza Kitchen. There were places like that, right? But to me, that was fast food type of eating. And I grew up in an Italian family where we made pizza at home. So yeah, I went to California Pizza Kitchen because that's where my friends wanted to go. But I mean, did I dream about going there all the time? No. The thing I remember the most about those days was frozen yogurt. Yeah. TCBY? Yeah. Loved frozen yogurt. That was like, I don't know why, it just felt like revolutionary with toppings.

17:34And then I went to certain ones that mixed it in front of you. It was so good. TCBY back then was so good. Exactly. We haven't had yogurt since then, like at all. No, it's different. It's different. I like Asian flavors a lot. Like pink berry is cool and that's a whole different genre. But we're talking about the Western flavors. The peanut butter hit different in 1988. It's a totally different. Yes. So if you ask me what the food was like, I mean, Cup of Noodles was maybe what I had in college. But other than that, I did not like fast food. Westwood didn't have a scene? There was nothing going on there?

18:07Not really? I mean, it had Olive Garden, which I didn't go to. LA is so interesting. It had, not really. You're articulating exactly what I wanted. We just didn't have what you're thinking. We had like random here and there mom and pop shops, but nothing that I loved. All I remember is TCBY for yogurt. I loved it, loved it. And I'd have cup of noodles here and there. But otherwise, people came over. I cooked all the time. I mean, the LA food scene is really, really, really come along the way. And also, there were no celebrity chefs at the time. Anyway, that world didn't exist. Absolutely not. You've articulated my point.

18:44You've made it beautifully that LA's food scene. It's really changed. We have a lot of listeners who live in L.A. who are younger and don't realize that it was not what it is now. No. At all. Not even remotely. Let's talk about another city that has changed greatly. And you're very aware of this is Las Vegas. Because I love that you operate there with, you know, a big scale. I love to get a sense of why you enjoy operating Las Vegas, which to me is one of America's great food cities that doesn't get quite the attention. I think we obviously have the big celebrity places. You are your place is a celebrity place.

19:18But there's also a lot going on there in the food world. And I'll just close and say people visit Vegas for the food and maybe not the gambling, too. So the reason that I was given an opportunity to go to Vegas is because they started to realize and this is 10 years ago that people were coming for food, food and entertainment, not so much gambling. And they were really trying to harness the female community. And so in doing that, I was one of the first, because I think Bordegril was also there, but one of the very first celebrity female chefs to come into that city right on the strip. And the ability to build my own restaurant from a two-floor parking garage was with the view of the Bellagio Fountains with windows that open up to the strip.

20:08I mean, that was just with my name right on Las Vegas Boulevard. It's it's unheard of. Nobody gets that opportunity. And but I remember that that was the whole that was the whole point of me opening there is to get more families in there. And that's exactly what we did for. And we've been doing it. You operate two restaurants right now. Yeah. So one is a gourmet restaurant, Jada at the Cromwell. And the other one is a quick serve pronto at Caesars Palace. That's exciting. So let me ask you a bunch of questions to follow up. Now, how do you keep the quality high when you're not there all the time?

20:41That, to me, is always the challenge for a celebrity chef operating in multiple cities, multiple time zones. I go there a lot. Yeah? Yeah. Your name's on the door. Well, but the thing is, not everybody does. No. I go there a lot, but luckily, I don't live very far. I live, what, 45-minute plane ride away, so I go often. I do random checks where I am unannounced and I show up. I also have people go to the restaurant when I'm not there that are undercover, basically, to give me to give me sort of a heads up on what is going on and what's the food. And then also I put people in place there that I know and that I have mentored and that understand my food.

21:23And it's just about staying on top of it. I have a guy who works for me who's been working for me for a while, Michael Spiegel, and he lives in Las Vegas. And he basically goes every day. And that's the kind of that's what you need. You need someone boots on the ground every day. Believe it or not. For me, you know, I just opened my third restaurant in Scottsdale. But before that, for 10 years, I had only those two in Vegas. And that makes it easier to stay on top of things. Yeah. If you don't have, you know, 25 of them. Yeah. And I'm glad you made the point of your scale is not an aggressive sense of it's not like a different model.

22:01No, but you have to understand that in the restaurant business, if you don't have scale, it's very difficult to make money. Like, I don't think everybody understands. Like Vegas is – take Vegas out of it because Vegas is an anomaly. It's a city that's special compared to any other city. Even New York City is not like Vegas. People really go from all over the world just for food, which is phenomenal. But if you don't have scale in the restaurant business, making money is – It's a low-margin business. It's incredibly low margin. Do you ever make it out to Vegas, other restaurants in the city? I know you're there to work.

22:35Oh, sure. I go test out a lot of other restaurants. I went to Carbone. I've been, Bobby Flay just opened a new French restaurant. I go and check out all my, you know, all my peeps and competitors. I mean, you have to. So in Vegas, I do it a lot. Yeah. In fact, I go out to check out competitors more where I have a restaurant than I do in any other city. Yeah, I bet. I mean, because it is like a competitive marketplace. Exactly. Opening in the Phoenix market. I was just in Phoenix in December and lovely town. Lovely place. I had never been. And my friend Angelo Sosa just opened a great restaurant up there and you've just opened a restaurant.

23:12What's that been like opening in Phoenix or Scottsdale? Well, Scottsdale has been. I'm just shocked at the amount of restaurants and the quality and the standards. Agree. It's really phenomenal how far they've come since, I think, I signed my deal to open in 2019. I think they've grown, that city has grown a ton since then. A lot of people who really value the quality of the food, the service, just the experience as a whole. So, I mean, I've only been open, I opened, what, eight weeks ago? Yeah. So, not that long. But it's been phenomenal. It really has. What's the cuisine like then in Scottsdale?