There is something about consuming a home cooked meal that just makes people relax and enjoy the fleeting minutes of peace before returning to their hectic lives. So when Rochelle Randazzo placed the delectable pasta and fresh Alfredo sauce in front of my friend and I, we immediately felt amazing.

Rochelle Randazzo is the founder of the 100 percent woman owned business, Randazzo’s Honest to Goodness Sauces. She is also mom to two teenage boys.  Ever since she was child living in Long Island, Rochelle had been watching and helping her mother cook homemade meals seven nights a week. Her mother would make homemade sauces using natural ingredients, and Randazzo used what her mother taught her to cooked when she moved into her own home.

Randazzo went to college at Hofstra with a major in Broadcast Journalism and was originally a salesperson for a newspaper. When she had her first son, Randazzo stopped working to focus on her family. She had her second son a few years later. She had trouble reentering the workforce after staying home to raise her children, so she began to think of something she could do on her own. The sauce club idea came to Rochelle when sitting on a lounge chair at Club Med in Punta Cana.

‘You know what would be fun? Setting up a club where people joined and got information every week to order sauces,’” Randazzo said.

The sauce club, Rochelle describes, were tasting parties she would throw where she invited women from town to try her sauces and sign up for weekly sauce deliveries. Randazzo ran the club for about three years, still using all natural ingredients just as her mother did. The club grew steadily and eventually became a full fledged business.

However, forming this business was very difficult. Rochelle had to overcome several obstacles along the way, including dealing with manufacturing plants. But most shockingly, she had to work with people who discredited her.

“Some of them looked at me like a housewife who has a pasta sauce and were thinking ‘What does she know about the world?’” she said. “I found myself sitting across the table from some very condescending people, and all that did was fuel my fire to just blow right past that situation and that’s exactly what happened”.

Many also doubted her skills for the fact that she was a mother. Rochelle explains that they would ask her questions like “Will you be able to make it into work if your kids are sick”along with other patronizing remarks.

“If you have a woman who has two kids or three kids or five kids chances are she’s an amazing multitasker and she’s going to be able to accomplish more in two hours than any other person can in eight,” she said.

Randazzo’s Honest to Goodness Sauces are now sold in about 600 stores in the United States, and Rochelle credits the success to her all natural ingredients.

“The best decision I ever made and kept making was never backing down off my ingredients… [Consumers] don’t want to look at the back of a label of an item and have to spend 5 minutes reading it. They just want to look and say I recognize these five things that are in this item,”.

Randazzo encourages young girls to aspire to be business owners as well, telling them to outlast the no’s, take risks, and never look back.