A crowdfunding campaign to build out a third Pasta Supply Co. location in Cole Valley is already well past the halfway mark toward its $400,000 goal, just one week after sales began. Chef and owner Anthony Strong launched the community funding program last Wednesday to finance the buildout of a new shop at 919 Cole Street, and neighbors are buying in through subscriptions that promise a box of fresh pasta every week, some for a year and some for life.
According to Eater San Francisco, the campaign offers a $550 tier that guarantees a year of weekly pasta pickups and a $4,000 “pasta for life” tier with no age restriction on who can hold it. One customer reportedly put the lifetime subscription in their child's name, banking on decades of weekly boxes to come. Subscribers pick up their pasta at the Mission or Richmond locations now, or can wait and start collecting once the Cole Valley shop opens, and the program lets people skip a week here and there, though it does not allow stockpiling a month's worth of pasta in a single visit.
How the Cole Valley Shop Will Actually Run
The new storefront spans roughly 700 square feet and will operate as a counter-service shop with about 24 indoor seats plus sidewalk seating, according to WhatNow. Filled pastas and house-made sauces will be prepped daily at Pasta Supply Co.'s Mission District production facility and delivered to Cole Valley, freeing up the smaller kitchen to focus on boiling pasta and heating sauces rather than making everything from scratch on-site. That Mission hub opened in 2024, the same outlet notes, giving the company a central production base as it now stretches to a third neighborhood.
To keep kitchen capacity and ingredient supply in check, the same report notes that Pasta Supply Co. capped the $550 one-year tier at 200 slots and the $4,000 lifetime tier at 100 slots, with the campaign aiming to raise $400,000 in direct community funding. Eater SF reports the subscriptions include fresh and filled pasta along with house-made sauces for home cooking, though ready-to-bake lasagnas are excluded from the offerings. Pasta Supply Co. is running the whole thing through its own restaurant website rather than a third-party crowdfunding platform, which the outlet says lets the company avoid paying a commission to a crowdfunding site.
A Give-Back Built Into the Business Model
Companies can also purchase pasta subscriptions for their employees, and per Eater SF, Pasta Supply Co. will donate one subscription to a San Francisco school for every 10 company subscriptions purchased, with schools free to use the donated subscriptions for fundraising or other purposes. Strong told the outlet the program could serve as a potential funding model for other small businesses, such as bakeries, looking to raise capital without banks or crowdfunding fees. To keep pickups organized across three locations, the company uses a program to track pasta pickups that includes a photo of the customer scheduled to collect that week's box.
Strong has lived in Cole Valley with his wife for 12 years, putting the new shop just blocks from his own front door, according to The San Francisco Standard. The storefront became available after Peet's Coffee shuttered roughly 30 Bay Area branches in January during a corporate restructuring tied to parent company JDE Peet's acquisition by Keurig Dr Pepper, a closure Hoodline previously reported that ended the coffee chain's decades-long run in the neighborhood.
From Clement Street DIY Build to a Third Storefront
The Standard's account traces the company's growth: Pasta Supply Co. opened its original storefront at 236 Clement St. in the Inner Richmond in April 2023 and expanded to a second location at 3233 22nd St. in the Mission in May 2024, taking over the former Dumpling Club space. Across its locations, the business produces more than 30 fresh pasta shapes and 15 sauces daily, the outlet reports, keeping retail fresh pasta around $10 and cooked combo plates around $19 to $20 — a market-restaurant hybrid Strong designed to sidestep the markups of upscale dining.
Before Pasta Supply Co., Strong spent more than a decade with the Delfina Restaurant Group, serving as executive chef of Delfina and head chef of Locanda and helping open five of the group's Bay Area establishments, according to Eat Drink Films. Locanda closed permanently during the pandemic. After his first solo restaurant, Prairie, closed in 2020, Strong operated a neighborhood general store before hosting four-person private dinners in a vintage 1989 Volkswagen camper van called SuperStella, which ran pop-ups at SPARK Social and the Ferry Building — a chapter Hoodline covered in an earlier report on Strong's camper van dinners.
Strong built out and tiled the original Clement Street storefront himself, using online YouTube tutorials during a stretch of high inflation, a hands-on approach to bootstrapping the outlet notes still shapes his direct-to-customer funding model today. Eater SF describes Pasta Supply Co. as an independent restaurant and market, and Strong has said he wants his shops to reinforce the value of neighborhood community. The Cole Valley location is expected to debut this fall, with Pasta Supply Co. hoping it becomes as much a neighborhood staple as its Richmond and Mission counterparts already are.
