Well, not exactly.

It also included a wine bottle and a knife in the very first attempt to make pasta from chickpeas. The recipe came together in the Detroit kitchen of co-founder Brian Rudolph in 2013.

The first batch wasn’t great. It wasn’t even good. But the fire was lit. Brian loved pasta and he was eating it multiple times a week, but he wanted something different. He wanted something better. Better for his health and for the environment.

Chickpeas might as well have superpowers. They're considered both a protein and a vegetable source, which makes them naturally higher in protein and fiber. Eating more beans, like chickpeas, is correlated with long-term health benefits, like reduced risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

If you could figure out how to make pasta from chickpea flour that wasn’t just good for you, but tasted good, wouldn’t that be good for everyone?

So Brian kept going. He upgraded to a pawn store-purchased pasta maker, experimented with different ratios, and realized precision was key. Yet, the texture wasn’t quite there. So he went to Whole Foods and purchased all the gluten free baking ingredients he could find. And then the ta-da moment. Banza pasta was officially born.

Now it was time to bring Banza from a Detroit kitchen to your kitchen. To help make that possible, Brian enlisted his older brother Scott to team up and figure out how to get Banza into grocery stores across the country. There was so much brotherly love that Scott ultimately left his Wall Street job to grow the company and the orange box officially hit the shelves.