Our story
It started with a label.
When her daughter Elena began eating solid food, Anca did what any new mother does — she read the labels. Baby food. Children's pasta. Snacks for kids on the supermarket shelves of Bucharest. She didn't recognise half the ingredients. The one thing Elena reliably loved — pasta — was just refined flour, water, and a long list of words Anca couldn't pronounce.
That's not the pasta Anca grew up on.
A village in the mountains
Anca grew up in Maramureș, in the north of Romania, in the foothills of the Carpathians. Her grandmother made fresh egg pasta every Saturday morning. There were no labels on those Saturdays. There were three ingredients: flour from the village mill, eggs from the chickens out back, and water from the well. Whatever was in the garden — wild garlic, beetroot from the cellar, spinach from spring — went into the dough on the days you wanted colour on the plate.
That's the pasta Anca wanted to buy for Elena. She couldn't find it on any supermarket shelf in the EU.
So she made her own. In her own kitchen first, then in a small workshop she rented, then in a proper atelier she built in 2021 just outside her home village.
The recipe
The recipe is simple. Italian durum wheat from Puglia — the hardest in the world, the one that holds its shape after cooking. Free-range eggs from farms a ten-minute walk from the atelier. Whole, raw vegetables from two gardeners in the next village over. Never powder.
The vegetables go in raw. The dough takes on their colour, their nutrients, their flavour. Then the pasta is shaped, hung on wooden racks, and dried slowly for three to four days at room temperature. Industrial pasta dries in four hours. Ours takes ninety times longer. That's what makes it hold sauce. That's what keeps the vegetables alive in the pack.
Three ingredients. Slow time. No E-numbers, no stabilisers, no preservatives, no compromises.
How it spread
Years later, Anca's son Andy went through the same picky-eater phase Elena had. The same pasta worked again. Then it worked for friends. Then for friends of friends. Then orders started coming in from Bucharest. Then Cluj. Then from outside Romania.
Today, Verdella ships across the EU directly from the atelier in Maramureș. Every pack is still made in small batches. Every box is still packed by people Anca knows by name. Every batch still rests on a wooden rack for three days before it leaves the atelier.
The promise
Anca's promise hasn't changed: if she wouldn't feed it to Elena, she won't sell it to your child either.
That's why every order comes with the 30-day Picky Kid Promise. Try our pasta for 30 days. If your child doesn't eat it, we refund 100%. Keep the box. No returns needed. We'd rather lose €11 than your trust.
— The Verdella atelier, Maramureș, Romania