Lindsay Marie Morris

Between Sicily's cannoli, cakes, and gelato-stuffed brioche, the island offers plenty of tempting sweet treats. But not everyone can partake.

 

Kasia Bos, who suffers from gluten intolerance, was tired of the lack of choices for people like herself. So, in 2022, she and her partner, co-founder Diego Di Giovanni, launched Terved, a Catania, Sicily-based company committed to not only meeting dietary needs but also exceeding taste and quality expectations. 

I caught up with Kasia and Diego to discuss Terved and its inspiration, the challenges the young entrepreneurs faced, how they balance tradition with necessary ingredients, how they build relationships, what Terved's future looks like, and their advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.

 

 

What inspired Terved?

Kasia: I had gotten prescribed a gluten-free diet because of problems with my intestine. So my doctor advised me to go gluten-free, and from there, it started this new world of gluten-free. 

Diego met me a little bit after I had started this gluten-free diet. We were both young, and we wanted to do something. We thought, "Why don't we do something about the problem many people have, which is that it's still impossible to be gluten-free?"  We turned it into something productive and beautiful.  

 

Tell us about your product offerings.

Diego: We focus on the more regional and typical products, such as the cannoli and brioche we use for ice cream. But then the demand and the market also asked us for more and different products. We also developed products such as donuts that are more international. We made muffins and mini tarts with pistachio and apricot jam. Right now, we are trying to evolve and adapt to the market demand to satisfy and cover all the possible scenarios that we can. 
 

What challenges did you face starting your business?

Diego: We started very young. I was 22, she was 18. So, we both didn't have much life experience to deal with failures. So the first nos were very hard to take. Also, it was difficult to co-work and have two minds, two ideas that had to meld together at the end of the day. 

The most difficult, from my point of view, is the financial part because business knowledge is something that we managed to get from studying from other people as well as from experimenting, from failures, and so on. But the financial part is tricky because to make money, you have to invest money. And when you are so young, you don't have money. No one wants to give you money. 

 

Terved Co-founders Kasia Bos and Diego Di Giovanni

 

What is your process for developing products?

Kasia: When we started, we thought, "We are in Italy. He's Sicilian. So what can we do? Where can we start? What do people need?" So we came up with the concept of cannoli and the brioche, the most typical Sicilian products you can find. 

We already had a small community of people who followed us during the beginning of our journey. So we would try recipes with them. People who had celiac connected with us, and we asked them, "Is this an interesting product? Could this be a better product?" We did a little quiz. 

The difficult part was actually making that product happen. So we went from making recipes at home to going to specialists who could actually make those products last. From there, it's just been about spreading the product as much as possible. 

 

How do you ensure there's no cross-contamination?

Diego: All the products are individually packed. So even when they arrive from the laboratory to the final destination, we make sure that they are one hundred percent safe.

  

Kasia: At the end of the day, it goes from the laboratory to the hands of the consumer without getting touched by anyone. 

 

How do you balance traditional recipes with the need for gluten-free ingredients?

Diego: Of course, the flavor is not the same because when you change the flour, you change both taste, texture, the proofing of the product, the softness, the air—a lot of things. But our goal is to make a gluten-free version that reminds us of the traditional products. We are trying to develop a product that is as close as possible to the original one. 

 

How do you build relationships with clients, customers, partners, and distributors?

Diego: It depends on where these customers are located, but let's say that from a broader vision, we have a first approach on email. We use LinkedIn a lot. We introduce our company and what we do and send a catalog and a company presentation. Then, if we make a call, for example, to discuss a possible partnership, we send samples. If they're here in Sicily, we go meet them.

In our packaging, we include a little bit of our story and how we started. On social media, we try to entertain and talk about, for example, what we ate for dinner. We also try to attend events and fairs so we can meet customers. 

 

What's been the most rewarding part of this journey?

Kasia: For me, at least, it's actually having a face-to-face with the final consumer. When the actual client comes to you or writes a message to you and says, "Oh my God, your brioches are amazing!" 

The whole point of doing this is connecting with those people. In person, it's even better because once or twice, we were walking on the street, and out of nowhere, someone popped up and said, "Please never stop. You're amazing!" 

Diego: That's very heartwarming and beautiful. I would also like to add that I was astonished when a company reached out to us and told us they would like to bring our cannoli to Boston. 

We started from Catania, a small city of 200,000 citizens. Now, we are bringing our products to Boston, Australia, and the UK, and it happened so fast. We have another possibility for Miami and another company in Boston. Having your product so far away from your hometown is almost unbelievable.

 

Terved brioches on display at a supermarket.

 

What does Terved's future look like?

Kasia: We want to create more products and products that maybe haven't been seen before. We want to create more options. Right now, our focus is on supermarkets to really get in the hands of as many people as possible with higher quality products.

 

Diego: We have so many products that we could create. Another thing that we are trying to do is bring to supermarkets not just another gluten-free company but a premium gluten-free company. Our goal is to create a variety that is not currently in the market, at least here in Italy.

 

Kasia: The U.S. is way more advanced in that supermarkets carry 20 different kinds of gluten-free breads and 50 types of cookies. In Italy, it's really bad. You see two companies where there should be more options.

 

What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Diego: We started with no experience, with no money, with nothing. We were very naive and a little bit reckless.

Surround yourself with experienced people. Try to listen because we gained knowledge from people who knew the business and knew more about life. Don't be scared of losing friends or sleep. Eventually, it's all going to be rewarded.

 

What experience do you want for your customers?

Diego: We just want them to feel listened to, not to be excluded.

Kasia: This is why we started, right? For them not to feel excluded. So when they eat, it's not like they have to think about it. It is just there. We want people to feel at ease.

 

 

 

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One of my favorite Sicilian treats as a child was torrone, a nut-filled nougat candy my Sicilian grandmother always had on hand, especially for the holidays.

I recently encountered a recipe for torrone in the pages of Giovanna Bellia La Marca's Sicilian Feast, recently reissued as an expanded edition of her 2004 book. 

"Torrone is such a part of Sicilian cuisine that no holiday goes by without it," says Giovanna. "It's delicious. Children love it; adults love it. So it's just part of our culture and kind of a symbol of Sicily."

Giovanna La Marca, who came to the U.S. from Sicily when she was 10 years old, also runs the Kitchen on the Cliff YouTube channel. The name is a nod to the fact that her kitchen is actually on a cliff overlooking Manhattan. 

Giovanna shared with me the history of torrone, how the Sicilian recipe differs from that of mainland Italy, and how this nougat treat has become a Sicilian symbol.

 

 

What is torrone?

Torrone is a nougat candy, and in Sicily, we make it with almonds and sugar or almonds and a combination of sugar and honey. 

It is very much tied to our history. Since antiquity, many people have invaded Sicily. There were the Greeks who made settlements all over Sicily, and they, of course, brought the trees.

The myth is that a boat carrying almond trees and grapevines was going to Puglia, the heel of Italy, which is very close to Greece. And the wind blew it to Sicily. 

But the sweets! Sicily is quite famous for its sweets. One of the great sweets is torrone, and another one is marzipan, which are little sculptures of fruits that are so lifelike that when you see them in the window of the pasticceria, it is just amazing to see the likeness and the artistry with which they are made. 

To achieve that, Sicilians already had almonds, but the sugar was brought by the Arabs around 700, and they planted sugarcane in Sicily.

An interesting side note of that is that the sugar industry in Sicily was dominated by the resident Jews. There was quite a large Jewish colony in Sicily, and they developed the sugar industry. 

Now unfortunately, in 1492, when Spain expelled the Jews, they expelled them not only from their own country but from all the places that they controlled as well, which included Sicily. The Sicilians had no quarrel with the Jews. In fact, the Jewish people really ran the sugar industry. So they waited six months. They didn't want to expel them. But Spain prevailed. And that ended the sugar industry in Sicily, which is a little-known fact but a very interesting one, I think.

 

How does Sicilian torrone differ from torrone found elsewhere in Italy?

Well, the typical torrone of Italy is white, and it's made with a meringue of sugar and almonds and sometimes other nuts and sometimes bits of citron and so on. It is poured on edible rice paper, and that's how it's served and cut. 

In Sicily, it is really almonds surrounded by crunchy caramel. It's very, very crunchy. It's actually a brittle. You can cut it with a knife, and you get all the cross sections of the almonds, which is very pretty. But you can also break it. It breaks in odd shapes, and that's another way that we usually serve it.

 

As a child, I had trouble with it because I didn't have the patience to let it melt in my mouth. I wanted to chew it, and chewing it was a job because it was really quite hard. 

I'm not talking about the soft caramel we all know. I'm talking about true caramel, which, if you pour into a greased bowl and turn the bowl upside down, you end up with a bowl made of caramel.

It's used that way for very high cuisine. In Sicily, we have two cuisines. We have home cooking, which is extremely rich and wonderful because it's influenced by all the invasions. Our invaders did contribute a great deal; they didn't just invade. They contributed to the language. They contributed to music, and they contributed to the food. 

 

What developed in Sicily in the Renaissance was a cuisine for the aristocrats. The cooks were generally trained in France, then came back to Sicily and became the monzu. These professional chefs worked for two entities: the church and the aristocracy. And that was an extraordinary cuisine. 

 

What does torrone symbolize for Sicily?

Well, it's something delicious, and sweets are generally the food that you get at festivals. They're always served at Christmas and for all of the feasts. Every Sicilian town has a patron saint and a feast for the patron saint. 

It really represents Sicily in its products because of the almonds of Sicily, particularly the city of Avola. Avola produces almonds that are called pizzuta, which means pointy almonds. They are very, very fragrant and very flavorful. That, of course, is due to the climate and the soil. In Sicily, the volcanic soil produces fruits and nuts with flavors you don't get otherwise.

Almonds are part of a very important festival in Agrigento. The almonds fruit in February. So, in February, Agrigento is filled with almond trees in bloom. The almond trees in bloom have such a heady perfume that you almost feel enveloped by the scent of the almonds and the almond trees. So there's a lot of folklore around it.

 

What was your goal with your cookbook, and what do you hope readers will take away?

I think I had very specific reasons for writing a book. I am a cook. I am a passionate cook. I have always loved to cook. I started when I was 10 years old. 

My mother cooked well, but she wasn't passionate about it. She had to have a perfectly orderly house and a floor that you could eat off of. My father did a lot of cooking, and he was very good, and I was his assistant. So if he made, say, risotto, I was the one who chopped the mushrooms. And the mushrooms for the risotto had to be about the same size as the grains of rice. So, I had a very good beginning. 

I met Italian Americans and Sicilian Americans, and they always said, "I remember my grandmother's cooking. It was so delicious. It was so wonderful. But she didn't leave any recipes, and I was too young to ask for recipes."

I heard this over and over again, so I thought, "I would like to write a cookbook that gives them Nonna's recipes."

 

My aim was to give typical and original recipes—not versions of, but the original recipes, the recipes that we all came up with and that our grandmothers cooked.

 

>>Get your copy of Sicilian Feast here!<<

 

 

 

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