Letting go of the startup I spent my 30s building.

And what comes next.

I was so pregnant, and so happy to be sharing our sauce with the people.

This week’s Smart Cooks is a little bit different. For those who’ve been following along for a while, you know I’ve spent the last six years running the food startup not just co. that I cofounded with my business partner, Jacqueline.

Feel free to scroll if you’ve heard the story 1000 times, but I cornered Jacqueline in the Boston Public market when she was six months pregnant, and handed her a copy of the 10 veggie sauce I’d been making for my personal chef clients out of their farm share. At the time, we were both working at Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, and yearning to build something of our own.

We started working nights and weekends, putting production runs of “not just pasta sauce” on our credit cards, and asking favors of everyone we knew.

Ultimately, the business grew into a nationally distributed brand of salad dressings and pasta sauces that you could find in dreamy specialty food shops, and major grocery stores - plus a couple hundred Targets - across the country.

While running a food startup has never felt easy - and we faced challenges aplenty, from my difficult pregnancy with Pete, to Jacqueline’s daughter’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, plus the well-documented challenges of fundraising as a female founder, oh, and a pandemic - in the last year, things got pretty unmanageable from a working capital standpoint as we tried to scrappily compete with the big national brands we were now up against, in a seriously tough funding environment for small startups.

The ultimate decision to wind down the business was a brutal one - and to be perfectly honest, it never felt like a choice, so much as a gutting economic reality.

At times, this slow ending has felt like a divorce, even a death, and most recently, not dissimilar to the feeling of putting down a long suffering, much beloved family pet. Grief is a tricky beast.

The roller coaster has taken me through guilt, shame, anxiety, and cringe-worthy crying-on-the-kitchen-floor sadness. But finally, I feel ready to move ahead, grateful for the trial-by-fire “business school” that this experience has been.

Most of all, I’m thankful for the gift of getting to know so many great humans on this adventure, particularly my co-founder Jackie, who embarked on this with me as a newish work-friend. We now have a bond forged by fire (and many laughs), after having spent several years talking to each other more than our own families. Shout out to Artie and Greg for being the most kind, steadfast partners, and supporters of our business.

I’m relieved to have gotten to the stage of grief where I’m able to feel both real fondness and pride looking back, and hope and enthusiasm moving forward - which started with this newsletter, the first step I took to reconnect with the much-missed media career I left behind almost 7 years ago.

And now, I ask for a favor.

The truth is, Jackie and I have quite a bit of delicious (shelf-stable!) inventory that we need to sell through in order to properly close up shop, including a never-before released “umami magic” flavor of not just pasta sauce. As I write this, several pallets are being freighted here to us in Boston, and Jackie and I will be packing up orders of this last production run ourselves.

If you’d like to sample the most delicious pasta sauce ever made (a very biased review, I’ll admit) you can order 6 packs directly from notjust.co, and we will even cover the shipping. If you know someone who might enjoy this deal, could you forward this email to a friend? You can purchase all three flavors HERE.

This being a recipe newsletter, I’ll leave you some of my favorite not just pasta sauce recipes, which you can find HERE .

not just holiday pop-up staff in 2019. That peanut is now 9, and the newborn is 5.

You may have noticed I’ve taken a pause in the podcasting during all of this, and I’m afraid I’m going to need a few more weeks as I work on getting things wrapped up and start planning ahead. A heartfelt thank you for your support and patience as I properly close out this chapter so I can step into this next one with my whole heart.

Thank you, thank you ❤️