In April 2019, Mayor Bill de Blasio instituted a straw ban in New York City (with a few exceptions). That same month, somewhere across the city, friends Anthony Barresi and Dave Sedacca were wondering why there was still no eco-friendly, functional, single-use straw on the market — eventually leading them to invent gluten-free pasta straws.
“We were sitting in my apartment one night, we were drinking a couple cocktails, as all good creative stories typically start, and I had paper straws. And we were just fed up with them, because they absolutely suck,” Barresi recalls in an exclusive interview with Green Matters.
“I’m Italian, and my family has made pasta as a family tradition for years. So I looked at Dave and said, ‘What if we made these out of pasta?’ and we just started laughing,” he says. “And that was when we had our lightbulb moment.”
