About Got Paella: Our story.
Got Paella. The Story.....
We are Carol & Benjamin Schuster. Our company GOT PAELLA LLC is located in Santa Barbara where we both reside with our two young daughters. We both are hands on owners that are involved in the every-day life and operation of the company. Carol handles sales and distribution, Benjamin is in charge of product development, process compliance and packaging.
We are professional Spanish paella caterers and our paella journey started in 2015 when we both decided to leave our high profile, corporate careers and pursuit our passion in food. Benjamin was raised in Spain with paella being the staple dish in the family for almost all occasions. Making Paella was always Benjamin’s passion and then naturally evolved in to our catering concept.
Due to our combined professional business and sales related experience, we have been able to successfully launch and grow our business exponentially every year by identifying niche opportunities in the food and service industry.
During the pandemic, all catering related services were forced to shut down. We pivoted to a ready-meal delivery concept that entailed cooking paellas on our food truck and delivering them to each client’s front door. We were able to single handedly sell over 3k meals during the hard shutdown (March 2020 to May 2020). We could have been able to sell more if we had already launched our direct to consumer, online concept. We just didn’t have enough hours in a day to attend to the growing demand.
Carol Vanegas Schuster, Owner
Benjamin Schuster, Executive Chef
Paella ready meals have been attempted before but have failed to deliver the quality, flavor and authenticity that a traditional paella requires. A 5-year process of R&D as well as an intensive 4 months Stage 3 of live consumer testing, gave us the ability to perfect a dish that met our standards to provide a consumer friendly and delicious paella skillet ready meal. Lastly, we decided on a frozen skillet ready meal which allows the consumer to enjoy making a paella at home and get that delicious flavor that you can only get directly from the pan with the added benefit of a year long shelf life.
Since our official product launch in November of 2020 GOT PAELLA is now selling to grocers in 7 different States as well as to the largest distributor of Spanish products in the US and CANADA, called LA TIENDA. Our goal is to reach 500 National Retailers by 2023 and in 2024, we plan take our product overseas to Canada.
WINNER KeHE GOLDEN TICKET
Out of 100 companies, GOT PAELLA, won, with eleven others for the highest quality based on ingredients, innovation, taste, scalability, packaging, purpose and passion.
About our Product
Our Paella comes frozen, in a 20oz serving size and has a shelf life of approximately 1 year. We currently offer the Seafood Paella and Vegan Paella for retail and wholesale.
There are no additives, gluten or dairy. We pride ourselves with using only natural ingredients sourced in the USA and high-quality seafood such as 21-25 sized shrimp, black mussels sourced in the state of Oregon, etc. Our product is manufactured in-house, at our FDA approved commercial kitchen facility in Santa Barbara, California.