Interview Questions:

• What is your business? — Pasta Tavola in Belleville. We manufacture and retail fresh pastas, ravioli, sauces, and oven-ready meals using 100 percent Ontario milled wheat and local-first sourced ingredients. Pasta Tavola began selling small batch pastas with much success at the Belleville Farmers’ market in 2009 and opened its storefront location in 2010.
• How long have you been in the region? — Victoria moved to the region in 2006 with her family. Paula moved here in 2010 when the business began.
• What brought you here? — Originally the reason was career-related and to be closer to family, but when the idea of starting a food manufacturing business began to unfold, it just made sense for us to build our business here.
• If you had to give the Bay of Quinte Region a slogan, what would it be? — Ever Growing Great.
• What is your best advice for surviving the winter? — Our fall and early winter season is quite busy, but during our down time we would say plan, plan, plan. We use our down time to plan for our next season.  We focus on what is key to keeping our operation moving, we stay on-point with upcoming trends and explore potential new product lines to be launched in the upcoming year. Keeping in touch with our customers and generating new sales is also very important during our down time as we can solidify relationships and build new ones for the upcoming year.
• What makes the Bay of Quinte region a good fit for your business? — The region is rich with fresh agricultural ingredients and the cost of setting up a facility was affordable. We always had the intention of growing our business through wholesaling our products throughout the province, and the Bay of Quinte is perfectly situated en route to cottage country and major city centres such as Ottawa, Kingston, and Toronto, which allows for a broader distribution of our products.
• What is something unexpected you’ve discovered about running a business in a small town? — There are so many passionate entrepreneurs! And “word of mouth” goes a longer way than we would have ever imagined!