Sean Knecht wasn’t looking to start another company when he first messaged Joe Sasto on Instagram. He just wanted help making better pasta. Sean had already built a startup before, a pet product brand called PrideBites, and he had been through the pace and pressure of running a business. Cooking was his creative escape—something he did for fun, especially after long workdays. He had been following Joe, who was gaining attention as the guy with the handle @chef.joe.sasto, posting videos of handmade pasta rolled out and sliced with the kind of speed and precision that only comes from years in professional kitchens.
They eventually met up in person. Sean had signed up for a private lesson, expecting a one-time crash course in pasta. Instead, he and Joe hit it off. They kept in touch, started talking more, and a few years later, Joe served a crispy pasta appetizer at one of his pop-ups in Los Angeles. It was an unpretentious dish—puffed pasta chips, fried golden, tossed with cheese and pepper—but everyone who tried it kept asking what it was. Sean tried it and told Joe, “This should be in a bag on shelves.” Joe laughed, but he’d been thinking the same thing for years.
Joe had been working in restaurants for over a decade—Quince in San Francisco, Cotogna, Lazy Bear, and others. He had the culinary background and the hands. He was already running pasta-making classes, doing pop-ups, and experimenting with snackable ideas that brought fine-dining flavors into casual formats. But what he didn’t have was experience with supply chains, sourcing, packaging, and distribution. Sean had built all of that before. So the two decided to team up and see if they could turn those crispy pasta chips into a real product.
They called it Tantos, named after Joe’s original pop-up, “Tanto Sí”—a phrase that roughly translates to “so much yes.” Joe started testing flavor blends in his apartment kitchen using pasta dough, cheese powders, and dried herbs. Sean got to work on sourcing ingredients and tracking down manufacturers who could scale the process from stovetop batches to commercial volume. That was easier said than done. No one in the pasta world had ever heard of puffed chips made from dried pasta dough. There was no existing process to follow.
They ended up doing most of it themselves. Joe would cook and season the early samples by hand. Sean bought ingredients in bulk wherever he could—sometimes at restaurant supply, sometimes at Costco—and figured out how to divide costs, file permits, and ship out orders from their living rooms. They didn’t raise outside funding. They just covered it out of pocket and split everything 50/50.
They launched four flavors, each one based on a classic pasta dish. Cacio e Pepe used sharp cheese and cracked pepper. Marinara leaned into tomato and garlic. Pesto had basil and parmesan. And Classico was a simpler olive oil and sea salt blend. All four used the same base: wheat pasta dough, puffed, dried, and seasoned. The ingredients were clean, with no preservatives or additives beyond dairy-based seasonings and herbs. The chips were packaged in brightly colored bags and sold in one-ounce servings—130 calories, five grams of fat, and about 370 mg of sodium per bag.
At first they sold only online. Then they moved into limited retail. Then JetBlue added Tantos to their Mint cabin snack rotation, serving the Cacio e Pepe flavor to passengers on cross-country flights. People started finding the bags in boutique markets and convenience stores in California and New York. The team was still small—just Joe and Sean—but they kept production moving by relying on contract manufacturing, rotating stock drops, and tight inventory control.
Joe focused on developing new flavors, improving seasoning blends, and filming cooking videos for social media. Sean handled the logistics, distribution, retail accounts, and packaging compliance. They both did customer service. They both packed boxes. They both restocked inventory in the early morning before their other jobs started for the day.
The chips haven’t changed much since the beginning. They still start with real pasta dough. They still get puffed and seasoned in small batches. And they’re still based on a simple idea: pasta, turned into a snack, with flavors you already know.
