4-Hers get cooking, marketing tips from a pro
Photos by Kristina Gabalski: Paul Guglielmo talks to Orleans County 4-H Cooking Club members about making pasta and sauce during their meeting at the Trolley Building.
Paul Guglielmo’s colorful illustrated labels, which depict himself as a child and his grandfather, are meant to create a strong emotional connection. He wants the labels to say, “I love you.”
KNOWLESVILLE – Rochester’s Paul Guglielmo spoke with members of the Orleans County Cornell Cooperative Extension 4-H Cooking Club on a recent afternoon during a meeting in the Trolley Building Kitchen.
Guglielmo makes a line of pasta sauces locally and he told 4-Hers about the process of making various sauces from fresh, local, seasonal ingredients.
“A few hours ago I was with a house full of family eating spaghetti,” Guglielmo said as he opened the program. The weekly family tradition and his grandparents’ pasta sauce recipe prompted him to begin the work of bottling and selling the sauce which his Grandpa Pete taught him to make when he was a child growing up in Ohio.
He told 4-Hers he went to the NYS State Food Venture Center – associated with Cornell University – in Geneva at the Agricultural Experiment Station to develop a commercial recipe from the family recipe. He began bottling the sauce at Permac Enterprises in Bergen and continues to do so, but has also expanded to a larger facility closer to Rochester which was once the site of a Ragu sauce bottling facility.
He explained the ingredients in his line of five sauces, which include the original sauce, a blush sauce with cheese, and a Sunday sauce with meat, as well as a sixth sauce which changes seasonally. The autumn seasonal sauce contains butternut squash and tends toward the sweet side, Guglielmo said.
He and the 4-Hers made a simple butter/oil/parmesan cheese sauce to put over pasta.
In addition to his sauce making business, Guglielmo is a Rochester radio show producer/personality. He works for iHeartMedia, Inc. and hosts a weekly food and wine show on WHAM 1180. His sauces are available at local stores including Wegmans and Tops.
