Italian-American chef Giada De Laurentiis began her career 23 years ago at Food Network doing TV shows, authoring New York Times best-selling cookbooks, and opening restaurants on both sides of the U.S. Throughout her career, the Emmy award-winning TV figure learned not only about the ever-changing landscape of the food industry but also about who her audience was.

With the rise of social platforms over the past decade, De Laurentiis decided to try social content creation, starting on Twitter and then posting on Instagram and Facebook. She discovered that with social media, she could foster a closer connection to her audience in real-time and in a way she couldn’t have with her career on TV. 

“I realized that I could grow a direct-to-consumer brand where I didn’t need networks, big box stores, or publishers to help me,” De Laurentiis says. “I could harness the narrative on my own and control that conversation. And that is why I decided to go on the entrepreneurial journey of building this company, Giadzy.”

Giadzy started as a blog in 2016 where De Laurentiis showcased content about her life as a single working mom. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and restaurants were down, she helped a friend with their Italian import business, selling Italian goods on Giadzy. From there, popularity for the products boomed and De Laurentiis began to seek funding to grow the platform into a real direct-to-consumer business.

When it comes to sourcing, Giadzy gets its food from small family producers who hand-pick fresh Italian ingredients. The process involves no mass production, as it is important to De Laurentiis to have the cleanest and simplest ingredients for her business. She added that this does come with its own challenges though.

“We all know that when scaling a business, you’ve got to figure out a way to mass-produce things—and that is not the philosophy behind Giadzy,” she says. “It is a balance of trying to figure out, ‘How do I stay true to the philosophy of what I believe but also scale a business?’ Those two don’t always align and I think that is the trickiest part of what I do.”

As the next generation enters the business, De Laurentiis looks not just to teach them what she knows, but to learn from them and hear about their experiences. The mentorship goes both ways for her and, when hiring at Giadzy, she often considers young people who grew up communicating digitally with people.

“I can mentor them on what I know from my 23-year career,” De Laurentiis says. “But they’re also mentoring me at the same time because the food industry and the way we absorb and digest food content has completely changed from when I started 23 years ago.”

After expanding her entrepreneurial skills and becoming a business owner, she can now tell stories from her perspective and communicate more directly with her audience. She enjoys watching the Giadzy team grow every day and meeting new people who have enhanced her knowledge on certain topics.

From Food Network TV personality to entrepreneur, Giada De Laurentiis stepped out of her comfort zone to try something completely different. She says that taking that jump and evolving can be difficult, especially when comfortable with where you are in life. 

“For someone like myself who’s done the same thing for so long, it’s so hard to jump off that cliff and say, ‘I’m going to do something totally different,’” she says. “But that is how we grow—and that is how we make the world better.”