Beginning with blissful and messy pasta and pizza making sessions with her father, Michelle Pusateri always found comfort and peace in the kitchen. The polaroid you see on each bag of granola is a photograph of her parents in 1968 laughing after a home-cooked meal. They taught her that good food is about wholesome ingredients prepared with love and care and shared with family and friends.
When Michelle was just a teenager, she started waiting tables and making cappuccinos at the local
Beginning with blissful and messy pasta and pizza making sessions with her father, Michelle Pusateri always found comfort and peace in the kitchen. The polaroid you see on each bag of granola is a photograph of her parents in 1968 laughing after a home-cooked meal. They taught her that good food is about wholesome ingredients prepared with love and care and shared with family and friends.
When Michelle was just a teenager, she started waiting tables and making cappuccinos at the local mall café. This experience sparked her love affair with the fast-paced environment of food service. After bartending for 15 years, she decided to make a change and take a few culinary classes at the local community college, and within one week of taking Basics of Baking and Pastry she fell in love with the science of baking. The idea that you can create bread or pastries from a few ingredients and your instincts intrigued her, and she was smitten from that point forward.
After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America, she moved to San Francisco where she worked as a pastry cook at The Fairmont Hotel, the Four Seasons Hotel and Nopa, and she was the Pastry Chef at Magnolia Brewing and Nopalito before starting Nana Joes Granola in 2010. Starting Nana Joes Granola was her moment of realization that she had a gift for baking and something special to give to the San Francisco community.
