"That's not how you spell dziadziu."

Yes, we know :)

This one is for the people in the comments.

As our business expands and we meet more pierogi lovers who might not be familiar with our story, we get this more often than we used to.

Why Jaju, and not dziadziu?

The answer is two-fold. For one… we spelled it that way growing up. That’s right: We were born from a Polish-American mother who wasn’t exactly at the top of her foreign language class, so she succumbed and spelled it phonetically. And didn’t know the difference. It actually wasn’t until we started putting together the business and did a little research that we realized that ‘Jaju’ was actually ‘dziadziu’ - an affectionate way of saying grandfather in Polish.

Secondly: We wanted to make pierogi for more than just Polish-language speakers. We want pierogi to be a household staple! Can you imagine the average Irish Catholic kid going to the supermarket and seeing “Dziadziu Pierogi” in the freezer? People around the country would be pronouncing it in a million ways - and maybe not knowing they were talking about the same thing. That’s bad for branding, and I have to think it dissuades a customer from buying. Because if someone doesn’t understand something, they move on pretty quickly.

So, Joanna, when you yell at us from Poland that we’re spelling it wrong and we’re dumb, just know… we made a very conscious decision to do this. Xoxo.

A little about our Jaju - and why we named the pierogi business after him.

Our grandfather, here on the right alongside his brother, started a turkey farm that then morphed into a Polish deli of sorts (no more turkeys these days!) with his siblings, back in the 1960s. It became a regional hidden gem; We’ve met so many people in our travels who have said, “Oh my gosh, I love their (pot pies, pierogi, kielbasa…)”

In middle school, I (Vanessa, one half of the pierogi sisters) would work at the store on Saturdays, helping my elders and the staff make the goods. They loved when I worked, because if anything went wrong, they could just blame it on me and my Jaju would let it slide. This is where I learned to make the family pierogi. Even at the store, they used odd tools to cut the pierogi (like pan lids?), just like at home.

Our Jaju was a community builder - he loved chatting with his customers and the ladies at the bank, was quite the practical jokester, and was beloved in the community for the relationships he built. He also had stamina, working at the store until one month before he passed at 87 years old. As a grandfather, he always kept us thinking. He would give me math problems to solve as he did his books, or have me sort through coins he got at the bank to decipher their value. He is someone we both remember as an icon in our lives.

We always had his pierogi (and kielbasa, golubki, and pot pies…) in the freezer growing up, and continued to keep an inventory when they went to college and had their first roommates. Based on all the questions they got, we came to understand that high quality pierogi were hard to find in the grocery store. After a few years of joking about starting a pierogi business, we decided to go back to the store and dust off our Jaju’s recipes (which, honestly, should really be kept in a safe somewhere…). And so, it began.

How we got to where we are today is a story we’ll keep telling here!

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