Key Takeaways
- Seattle-based quick informal pasta chain Due Cucina raised $2.5 million to increase past Washington state and open three eating places in Texas.
- The corporate is led by two finest mates who grew up in Italy. Its CEO is a former Amazon senior undertaking supervisor.
- The startup makes use of expertise and a vertically built-in provide chain to energy its enterprise.
Scrolling via the Dué Cucina menu one night this week, I chosen paccheri noodles with white truffle oil — one thing you would possibly count on at a elaborate restaurant staffed by waiters in bow ties.
However 20 minutes later, I obtained a textual content notification: there was a bag with my title on it at a small eatery in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
This approachability is a part of the attract of Dué Cucina, a fast-growing quick informal restaurant serving genuine Italian delicacies with three areas in residential neighborhoods throughout Seattle.
The corporate, led by a former Amazon undertaking supervisor and a nuclear science professional, simply landed $2.5 million from Houston-based restaurant funding firm Mac Haik Restaurant Group to open three new eating places in Texas, its first enlargement past Washington state.
Dué Cucina is aiming to take a chew of the $5.9 billion North American pasta trade by drawing on quick informal fashions from established corporations like Chipotle and Bellevue, Wash-based MOD Pizza. It presents patrons skill to customise pasta shapes, sauces and toppings.
Know-how additionally performs a key function with a web based app and web site for ordering. The corporate is amongst a lot of eating places inserting extra concentrate on digital orders due to pandemic-driven demand for takeout that continues to be robust.
Dué Cucina was based by two finest mates, Davide Macchi and Filippo Fiori. They first met in Tuscany, Italy, the place they rode the bus collectively to highschool.
In 2016, Macchi graduated with an MBA from MIT’s Sloan College of Administration, interning at cloud computing large VMWare as a part of his schooling. After school, he turned a senior undertaking supervisor at Amazon, partly to assist finance Dué Cucina in its early days.
Fiori graduated from Tsinghua College in China with a doctorate diploma in nuclear science and expertise. Throughout his time there, he taught cooking lessons and was a resident Italian chef at a well-circulated Chinese language cooking present.
After committing to pursue a longtime dream of opening a restaurant, the duo entered MIT’s entrepreneur-in-residence program, which allowed them to tinker with totally different recipes and develop a enterprise mannequin. It was the primary pasta enterprise to undergo the incubator.
Eater in 2017 wrote concerning the prevalence of fast-casual pasta retailers, however solely one of many corporations talked about within the story — Portland, Ore.-based Grassa — continues to be working.
Fiori and Macchi opened their first brick-and-mortar restaurant seven years in the past in Seattle’s Capitol Hill. They selected the situation due to a scarcity of comparable idea eating places within the area, the provision of substances, and the residential space.
Macchi stated the corporate purposefully prevented being in an office-centric district. From his time at Amazon he discovered that workers are sometimes too busy to eat out or carry their very own lunch. He additionally cited costly lease and competitors from meals vans and Amazon’s personal cafeteria.
The wager to focus on residential geographies has confirmed to be fruitful. Many small companies close to Amazon’s campus in Seattle’s South Lake Union have struggled amid the pandemic with workers working from house.
Macchi additionally drew on his tech expertise to develop the restaurant’s back-end programs.
The corporate, beforehand often known as Dueminuti, constructed its personal app for managers to onboard new workers, schedule working hours, and share details about recipes and cooking directions throughout areas. The corporate additionally “vertically built-in” its provide chain, with the kitchen producing its personal pasta, bread and sausage.
Dué Cucina’s app, which features a loyalty rewards program, has greater than 16,500 customers.
The corporate is following within the footsteps of different quick informal eating places that landed enterprise capital {dollars}, together with MOD and Sweetgreens, which went public in 2021.
Macchi stated the brand new areas in Texas will function a “proof-of-concept” for Dué Cucina’s skill to scale in new markets. If the brand new areas are as profitable as Seattle, he stated, the corporate will goal to boost extra funding.
“In Seattle, we’re established, and other people know us,” Macchi stated. “We might make 20 shops, however traders wouldn’t care very a lot. Traders need to see: ‘Can this go exterior of Seattle?’”
Dué Cucina plans to ascertain a three way partnership with Mac Haik Restaurant Group and open 10 further items in Texas by 2031, a part of a broader objective of opening a whole bunch of areas nationwide.