FULL FORK PREMIUM PASTA SAUCE

 

 

Birthday party to business: Woman’s Grandma’s Recipe sauce company marks 10 years

Linda Priscilla started Grandma’s Recipe, a company that markets a line of Italian sauces. It’s become a fulfilling retirement business for her and her husband. The business has its roots in, of all places, a birthday party.

By: Marc Bona, cleveland.com

AURORA, Ohio – When Linda Priscilla cooked for 75 people coming over for her mother’s 80th birthday party 20 years ago, she had no idea the celebratory moment would spawn a business.

“I prepared lasagna, chicken parmesan and rigatoni, and invited everybody over,” Linda said. “And everybody raved about the sauce. They were telling me ‘Take this to market, this is really good stuff.’ It took me a little while, then my husband I talked about it and said,
‘Yeah that does sound like a good idea, I think we’ll do it.’ "

Retirement was creeping up on Linda and her husband, Jim. They forged ahead with the business, got their grown kids involved - their daughter is a designer who does the labels, their son helps with store demos. Doing demos would get them out of the house, and they would get a chance to meet people, they figured.

Things have gone according to plan.

Grandma’s Recipe makes a line of sauces under the name Full Fork.The company sells four variations - spicy meaty, mild meaty (“Which has a lot of meat in it,” she said), sweet basil marinara and traditional marinara. A pizza sauce is coming soon. The irony in all this is Linda is not Italian. Well, maybe a trace according to a DNA test, she said, but she has always loved Italian food. “Even when my husband and I dated, every time we went out I would always get Italian food. There was just something about Italian food, and to this day, I still love it. There was only one year that I just couldn’t eat any more Italian food, and that’s when we were trying to get this right for the market; I was eating so much of it. Now we’re back on track, and I’m still loving it.”

They created the company 10 years ago. The following summer, they got into Heinen’s, Jim said. They work out of their home in Aurora. The sauce is made in Solon.

Linda worked in accounts receivable while her husband was an auto technician for a GM dealership in Bedford. He retired in 2018, she a year later. The retirement gig has blossomed, allowing more time to work on the sauce business, and they are hoping to get into restaurants, too, they said.

But it all started with a party to celebrate Linda’s mom, Rose Mary Malek.

“Everybody had a feast,” Linda said.“They just came over. And don’t ask me why it was all Italian. Everybody else seemed to love it, too.”

Linda owns the company, her first food-business venture. She said basil marinara is the top seller, with the spicy meat sauce also doing well.

The company’s name is an homage to Rosie, who made sauce, and her grandmother, Helen Labonovic. Both were Eastern European, Linda said, from the former Yugoslavia. That nation, now broken into multiple independent states, sat just to the east of Italy across the
Adriatic Sea. That might account for the Italian influence in her cooking.

“I think that whole Eastern European area, it was like a melting pot for so many different backgrounds,” Jim Priscilla said. “I think that’s where all that came from, because it’s just so diverse, you know, from Italy and Greece and Turkey, up through France and Germany and
everything. All those countries, it was such a blend of people.”

The sauce name “Full Fork” came about after Linda and her daughter in Columbus bandied about 100 different names, she said.

“My daughter and I, when we decided we’re going to do this business, we were really excited about it,” Linda said.
“So we sat on the phone for over an hour, just throwing things out there. And
we thought, ‘This is like a full fork of pasta sauce. When you turn it on your fork it doesn’t run off. It’s real nice and thick. So that was the reason we came up with ‘Full Fork.’ "

Full Fork sauces are available in Heinen’s, several Whole Foods and Meijer/Fairfax Market in Cleveland.