Two-person Italian snack brand reports $8,000 to $10,000 a month

Sfizi sells Italian taralli, the small ring-shaped crackers that usually turn up in a cellophane bag at the bottom of a supermarket cheese display.

Joe Fiorenzo and Sheela Prakash, who are married, launched the brand with three flavours in December 2025. Fiorenzo told Entrepreneur the business now averages $8,000 to $10,000 in gross sales a month, depending on the month.

On his account, that puts it on track for more than $100,000 in gross sales in its first year.

Neither founder had worked in consumer packaged goods. Fiorenzo spent 17 years in corporate insurance. Prakash has a food background and has studied and lived in Italy on and off for a decade, and writes cookbooks.

That inexperience shaped the first decision: start with one simple product rather than a range. Fiorenzo described taralli as an easy segue.

The sourcing was done cold. The couple sent about a dozen emails to Italian producers in early 2025 to find out what was possible, then spent two to three weeks travelling Puglia, visiting producers and tasting their products.

One requirement was practical rather than culinary. They wanted somebody on the producer's team who could communicate in English, so that anything complicated did not get lost in translation.

In parallel they approached brand design firms. Roughly the first six months went on brand identity and packaging rather than product.

Startup costs came to around $50,000, all of it the founders' own money. Fiorenzo says they are looking at outside investors next year.

The opening production run was deliberately small, because they had no baseline for demand and did not want to be out of pocket if nothing sold. It sold out in less than a month, and they scaled production from there.

Fiorenzo names order flow and timing as the hardest part of the business: guessing what sales will be, placing orders with Italian producers against that guess, and lining up packaging design, printing and vendor timelines behind it. Stock sits with a third-party warehouse.

Marketing runs on volume and barter. A contract social media worker, a friend of the couple, puts out 10 to 12 posts a week. They also run giveaway collaborations with other consumer brands, each side promoting the other's product, which costs stock rather than cash.

Both founders keep side projects going, because the workload on Sfizi swings from very time-consuming to considerably less so.

The useful lesson for anyone eyeing a physical product with no industry background is the sequencing. A dozen emails and a small first run bought the founders their demand data cheaply, and the sell-out told them how hard to push before they had committed serious money to inventory.