Vanessa and Casey White Co-founders of Jaju Pierogi
Welcome back to cooking with Chloe. This week, I’m making Polish-inspired dishes with help from sisters Vanessa (she/her) and Casey White (she/her), who are also the co-founders of their family biz, Jaju Pierogi. If you cry over sweet family stories, you might want to grab a tissue before reading on. “Our grandfather started a Polish deli in Western Massachusetts with his siblings, where they made pierogi as well as other Polish foods,” the sisters share. “We were lucky enough to grow up with pierogi always in our freezer—it was like our mac and cheese. When we went to college, we started to indoctrinate our friends to the pierogi life, and we noticed then that high-quality pierogi were very hard to come by at the grocery store.”
If you’ve ever had grocery store pierogi, then you know that these girls are right. But thanks to Vanessa and Casey, things are changing. “In 2015, we got our grandfather’s aka Jaju’s recipes and started playing with them on Vanessa’s kitchen table,” they say. “At the start of 2016, we went to our first farmers market and sold out in an hour! We then took pre-orders for 30 dozen more that we hand-delivered to people’s homes. We understood quickly that there was a demand and spent the next couple years building our brand through brewery pop-ups, farmers markets, and festivals, and started distributing to stores in 2017. The growth we experienced during the Covid lockdown gave us even more confidence to pursue other chains and distribution partnerships. Today, we’re in over 1k stores.”