When Omaha couple Jacque and Jake Burklund developed a sensitivity to tomatoes, they thought their days of enjoying pasta sauce were over. Favorite dishes like pasta, pizza, and lasagna were off the menu.
But instead of resigning to a life of antacids, they decided to fight this setback with food. After lots of research and years of research and development, they released Carinara, a carrot-based sauce that’s taken Omaha and the Midwest by storm.
“When we first started, we were nervous that we couldn’t get to the same flavor, that comfort food that they’re looking for,” Jake said. “Pasta sauce is such a staple for everyone. As soon as we got to that delicious flavor and took it to the farmers market, we kept hearing that comment: ‘Wow! That tastes just like marinara!’”
Carinara can now be found in more than 100 stores across the Midwest and will soon be available on Amazon.
Tomatoes are a member of the nightshade family and are highly acidic, so they can cause heartburn, joint pain, and inflammation in some people. That includes the Burklunds, who scoured the grocery store aisles for tomato-free pasta sauces. But most used a base of either cherries or beets, neither of which properly mimicked the flavor or texture of the pasta sauces they’d grown up loving.
Then Jacque recalled a cocktail competition among friends they’d competed in years ago, which she won with a carrot-based Bloody Mary. Could the same results be achieved in a pasta sauce?
She set to work in the couple’s home kitchen, relying on feedback from their large families after each round of tweaks to the recipe. After about 2.5 years, the Burklunds settled on the recipe they thought was ready for the public.
“There was a lot of sauce all over our cabinets,” Jacque said. “But we really tried tweaking it one thing at a time. We’d get input from friends and family. After you’ve been working on something for so long, you just kind of get this feeling once you get it right with the consistency, the taste, the texture. All of it coming together was really exciting.”
Carinara’s website was launched in 2023 and the Burklunds begun selling it at Omaha farmers markets. Some visitors were skeptical at first, but through handing out countless samples, the couple heard the same response time and time again.
“The most common thing that we get is, ‘Wow! That tastes like pasta sauce!’” Jake said. “Yeah, that’s the entire point. That’s why we made it!”
Near the end of 2023, the Burklunds convinced a Hy-Vee in Papillion to put Carinara on their shelves. They slowly got into more stores, but things really exploded once Carinara took first place in the pitch competition at the 2024 Hy-Vee OpportUNITY Inclusive Business Summit in Omaha. Not only did they win $30,000 to fuel their dream, but Hy-Vees all over the Midwest now wanted Carinara on their shelves.
Now the Burklunds sell 500-1,300 jars of Carinara each week, depending on the season. The increased demand caused them to move into Kitchen Council, a shared commissary kitchen that allowed them to dramatically increase their output. They’ve had to adjust their processes to keep up, and that will likely continue once Carinara hits Amazon in mid-October.
But the Burklunds feel incredibly blessed to have the opportunity to give other people with tomato sensitivities a taste of foods they thought were out of their lives forever.
“Every step that we take to scale our production, we almost have to start all over again,” Jacque said. “It’s a little scary to scale, but it’s really exciting once we can get it to taste just like it did in our home kitchen.”
