Through multiple generations, Jack Williams’ family has always had a soft spot for Italian cuisine.
Growing up in southern Missouri, Williams — now 76 and living in Lenexa — remembers his great-grandmother Angeline Morrelli’s pasta sauce making appearances in various dishes at family events.
After his great-grandmother passed away, his mother took up the mantle of making the sauce. And eventually, so did he.
The pasta sauce has been a staple in his family for more than a century. But it’s not just a family staple anymore.
Williams’ new pasta sauce line called Grandma Morrelli’s Homestyle Pasta Sauce hit the shelves at grocery stores across the Kansas City metro area this month, including several in Johnson County.
The sauce has been around for 125 years
Williams described the sauce as a light, slightly sweet sauce that doesn’t overshadow the things people might cook it with.
“I didn’t want to make anything too overpowering,” he said. “The bulk of people who buy pasta will add stuff to it.”
His great-grandmother created the sauce on their family farm in Cassville, Missouri. Today, the recipe has now been passed down through six generations of their family.
While it works great with pasta, he said, it also pairs great with other dishes like steak and grilled chicken — some of the dishes his family prepared the sauce with as he grew up.
Grandma Morrelli’s sauce will be in Balls Foods Stores
This month, the pasta sauce hit the shelves of several grocery stores. Currently, customers can find the sauce in any Hen House grocery store.
Eventually, it will be in all 26 of the Balls Foods Stores on either side of the metro area, including some Price Chopper stores, as well as some McKeever’s and Hy-Vee stores.
Kansas City-based Garden Complements makes the sauce, and Kansas City-based Paris Brothers is in charge of distributing it.
This is not Williams’ first business
Pasta sauce was not the only recipe up Angeline Morrelli’s sleeve. She also had what Williams recalls as a “fabulous” recipe for dill pickles.
That pickle recipe became the inspiration for Great Gran’s Pickles, which Williams launched in 2010. The company’s pickle jars featured the same photo of Morrelli who smiles back at customers on the jars of pasta sauce.
Williams ran Great Gran’s Pickles out of his commercial kitchen for roughly five years, with the pickles making it to 45 grocery stores before he sold the company in 2015.
Throughout retirement, Williams said he felt the desire to see his great-grandmother’s picture in grocery stores again. After all, by operating the pickle company, he’d seen firsthand how much the idea of a beloved family recipe resonated with customers.
“I used to have ladies in the grocery store who would kind of break down and get teary-eyed because it reminded them of their mother, of their aunt or of their own great-grandmother,” he said. “Everybody loves family stories about food.”
With Grandma Morrelli’s Homestyle Pasta Sauce, he’s looking forward to bringing back that dynamic. A father and grandfather himself, he plans to incorporate his own seven grandchildren into the business.
“I think the big exciting thing is sharing our family story,” he said. “To me, family is everything.”
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