“Wait, you were puffing store-bought pasta?!” That was my exact reaction the first time Chef Joe walked me through the scientific nuts and bolts of our future snack. Sure, I knew how to boil noodles, but frying them and having them puff into something airy and crunchy was a complete revelation. And let me tell you, it doesn’t just happen by chance—I’ve tried frying pasta myself, and it never puffed. Trust me, it ends up hard and crunchy, whether you boil it first or not.
When Joe started talking about frying times, optimal temperatures, and hydration levels, I was floored by how much culinary R&D goes into a deceptively simple chip. He’d mention starch gelatinization (or something equally science-y), and I’d nod along. This wasn’t just throwing pasta into hot oil; it was a precise process he tinkered with more times than he probably admitted to me.
At first, people were like, “Pasta chips? Huh?” It was tough to convey how different Tantos was without physically handing them a sample—and samples were few and far between because Joe was making them by hand. Once they tasted the final product, though, their eyes lit up. Of course, the inner voice in me kept wondering, “Do they really love it, or are they just being polite?” That’s the emotional roller coaster of being an entrepreneur: you’re convinced you have something new and exciting, but you need real-world validation to quiet the nagging doubts. Every positive taste test helped, but there was always a little noise in my head questioning if it was too good to be true.
Meanwhile, we kept having conversations about Tantos with anyone who would listen and realized we needed a snappy way to describe our snack’s texture and consistency. During one tasting session, Joe half-joked, “They’re basically plant-based pork rinds.” And you know what? It kind of worked. Even though we’d never claim to be exactly that, the description nailed our crisp, airy crunch—except it was made from pasta.
Standing Out in a Corn-and-Potato World
I can’t tell you how many times we roamed grocery aisles, analyzing every bag in the snack section. Corn, potato, more corn, more potato—delicious in their own right, but why wasn’t anyone making a true pasta-based chip? Sure, there was a brand out there calling themselves “pasta snacks,” but they weren’t even using real pasta! They used white beans and lentils pressed into pasta shapes. That only fueled our confidence: We can be the first real pasta chip on the shelf. And if we pull it off, we could carve out a totally new spot in the snack aisle.
At a time when countless new snack brands lean heavily on “better-for-you” marketing, we’re here to say something simple: we just taste really good. Sometimes, that’s exactly what you need—a snack that’s comfortingly familiar yet refreshingly different. That’s precisely why we’re betting on puffed pasta: it’s a flavor base everyone loves, reimagined in a way that deserves a spot right alongside the corn and potato standbys.
The heart of Tantos is about building a product around a dish practically everyone loves—pasta—and giving it a new form. We want Tantos to evoke that feeling of sitting down to a comforting bowl of noodles, only this time, you can snack on it wherever you happen to be. No fork required. It was a natural fit, and it felt authentic to our story from day one.
