Carla Bartolucci
Co-founder & CEO, Jovial Foods. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthorjovialfoods.com ↗
Alongside her husband Rodolfo Viola, Bartolucci co-founded organic Italian food brands Bionaturae and Jovial Foods, pioneering ancient einkorn wheat and gluten-free pantry products. She also authored the cookbook Einkorn: Recipes for Nature’s Original Wheat.
1shows
1appearances
22statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Carla Bartolucci said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Bartolucci: American food must move toward natural ingredients without additives
“America needs to be natural. It doesn't have to be, you know, hippie natural, but we can't keep eating all this, these additives.”
Bypassing middlemen to source directly from Italian factories spiked profits
“So we went there and found new factories and suddenly realized that the pricing that we had was very unfair, and so when we went direct, we made a lot more money.”
Bartolucci: Einkorn wheat lacks specific gluten proteins found in other wheats
“It has a very weak gluten. So there are certain types of glutinins or proteins. In all other kinds of wheat that einkorn does not have.”
Bartolucci rejected advisor pressure to make Jovial an einkorn-only brand
“A lot of advisors said, don't do anything but einkorn. You're the einkorn person. And I'm like, it's going to take years.
Guy Raz: To get people to know what it is.
Carla Bartolucci: I can't do that. I need to come up with, you know, something else.”
Einkorn wheat's thin margins wouldn't justify a launch financially
“If you looked at the margins on einkorn, they never would have happened unless I was crazy.”
Jovial refuses outside funding, financing all expansion strictly through cash flow
“I don't spend money unless I have it, so if I want to do a project, I make sure that we make the money that we need to cover it, because you can choose what supermarkets or chains or whatever you present to. You don't have to say yes to everybody.”
Bartolucci: In Italy, getting ahead without family wealth is almost impossible
“Because in Italy, you know, people don't really make a lot of money, and if your parents don't have something, it's almost impossible to get ahead”
Bartolucci took a $65,000 mortgage on parents' house for startup capital
“And we took 65,000 dollar mortgage on my parents' house.”
Bionaturae became the top-selling organic pasta in the US
“And so, it took, I'm not sure how many years, but BioNature became the number one organic selling pasta in the United States.”
Bionaturae reached about $15 million in annual sales around 2008
“I mean, we were about maybe fifteen million in sales and things were ok.”
Bartolucci: Einkorn is not gluten-free and cannot be eaten by celiacs
“It is not gluten-free. You can't eat it if you have celiac disease.”
Whole Foods took Jovial einkorn pasta nationally, but it failed to sell
“They took it nationally, and it was actually not too hard to get the products in distribution, but unfortunately, they did not sell.”
Jovial Foods reached profitability after three years of tight operations
“I think we were profitable after the third year. Not immensely profitable, and I think we had two years where we lost money, but we've run a tight ship.”
Bartolucci: Jovial's cassava pasta grew faster than its brown rice pasta
“So grain-free was becoming popular, and I felt like I could do this well with no added ingredients, nothing, just cassava and water, and that product has taken off way faster than brown rice pasta.”
Jovial has fully covered employee health insurance from day one
“So from day one, I've always paid a hundred percent of every employee's health insurance and covered every expense, because we have this European kind of sensibility to things like that.”
Bartolucci: Sold Mystic Food Business for About $25,000 After One Year
“So after a year, we decided to put the business up for sale. We just wanted to move back to Italy. My husband always wanted to own a farm or something, and we sold the business for about, I think it was like, 25,000 dollars.”
Bartolucci: First Bionaturae order was a $20,000 20-foot container
“Our first order, I believe it was about 20,000 dollars. It was a 20 foot container.”
Bionaturae hit $500,000 in first-year sales near break-even
“I think we managed to sell about 500,000 dollars the first year. And at the end of the year, I was really behind in the QuickBooks and putting things into the computers, but it was the end of the year, so I had put all the bills and all the expenses, and I ran…”
Bartolucci: Reinvested all profits annually instead of taking money out
“You're just gonna have to keep reinvesting your profits every year, and that's what I did.”
Bartolucci: Italy mandates certified restaurant training for celiac disease
“Italy loves people with food, and they regard celiac disease as a serious disease. So, you know, people are trained in restaurants, certified. They just have a complete respect.”
The other half of the tape: Carla Bartolucci's own voice is left out of every number here. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Carla Bartolucci, by other people (1)
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Carla's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Jovial Foods | 1 | 22 | 100% 4/4 | full record on How I Built This → |