Giada De Laurentiis announced her departure from The Food Network in February after a 21-year career with the channel. Now, the celeb chef is pivoting off-screen with her latest venture: a line of pasta called Giadzy Pasta.
For De Laurentiis, this was a natural next-step after Food Network, especially considering the fact she comes from a "pasta family" (her words). The former Giada at Home host's great-grandparents ran a pasta factory outside of Naples, Italy. Now, she's working with skilled Italian artisans to bring her own culinary dreams to life—and into your kitchen
"From all my years cooking it and working with different brands, I realized that there are certain things that I'm looking for in a pasta that I still haven't quite found all in one package," De Laurentiis told PEOPLE.
While Giada calls herself "very lucky" for the time she spent at the network, Giadzy—the lifestyle e-commerce platform where she sells Italian products, including the harder-to-find pasta shapes—is "a dream come true" that she's been envisioning for nearly two decades.
In addition to her e-commerce site and pasta release, De Laurentiis is working on unscripted series production with Amazon Studios too—where she no longer has to "compromise."
"I've had a rebirth in my career and in what I really want to do," she said of her departure from The Food Network. "Partnerships have been amazing over the years and I've been super lucky, but I haven't been able to really tell the full story. At the heart of it, I'm a teacher and a storyteller, and when you're in a partnership with somebody else, you have to make compromises in that storytelling."
Her Giadzy Pasta is made in the Abruzzo region of Italy and includes an array of shapes: nodi marini, bucatini, taccole, pappardelle, paccheri, bucatini lunghi, manfredi lunghi, and spaghetti chitarra.
