Some of the iconic New Haven products (above) Steve Thomas (below, at WNHH FM) sends out.
Steve Thomas noticed New Haven ex-pats hankering online for some Elm City pie and cannoli — and willing to pay to have someone ship it to them.
That was five years ago. Thomas was in between chief marketing jobs at the time, checking Facebook groups.
“I kept seeing these posts: ‘I miss my Lucibello’s,’ ” Thomas recalled Thursday during an interview on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
“I kept seeing these posts from people who had moved away. They were just so sad about the fact that they couldn’t get the food that they grew up with and they loved anymore. ‘There’s no good pizza in South Carolina.’ ‘I miss my Lucibello’s!’ …
“So I put a post up, and I said, ‘If there were a business that shopped for this for you and shipped it down to you, would you use it?’ ”
A typical response: “Oh my God. You have to do this.”
An idea was born. Five years later, it has a name: New Haven Direct Connect. A website. Along with weekly UPS shippings of packages from 14 iconic New Haven family-run food businesses to New Haven food lovers around the country.
Thomas, who is 64 and grew up on New Haven’s east side, started New Haven Direct Connect out of his garage a year and a half ago. It was a life leap: He’d spent his career in corporate marketing at companies like Edible Arrangements and Subway working with entrepreneurs. Now he summoned a life’s worth of marketing and operational lessons to take the entrepreneurial leap.
“I had become wary of the corporate world,” he recalled. Thomas received a $15,000 small-business loan and a $5,000 grant from NHE3 incubator. He lined up 14 “partners,” from Hummel Bros. hot dogs to Foxon Park soda, Lamberti’s Italian Sausage, Grand Apizza, Liuzzi Cheese, Apicella’s Bakery, Durante’s Pasta, Claire’s Corner Copia (surprise! Lithuanian coffee cake) and, of course, Lucibello’s Italian Pastry Shop. He enlisted a digital marketing firm to get the word out online. And he began collecting weekly orders on Sundays, sending in the orders to partners, picking up the food on Mondays, packaging and handing it all to UPS on Tuesdays for delivery by Thursday. Then repeat.
The business hit the break-even point late in 2024, Thomas said. It’s shipping more than 100 packages a month to Elm City apizza-cannoli-pasta-antipasto-sausage-loving former New Haveners in southern states and Las Vegas, as well as corners of Connecticut like Litchfield County. Other customers include New Haveners sending hometown culinary love to far-flung relatives.
Thomas is just getting started. He has his eye on expanding both the number of New Haven goods to ship and customers to ship to.
“This is new-found business” for the family-run New Haven bakeries and food manufacturers, he said. And a new-found calling for a lifelong local marketer chasing a new life-stage dream.
Click on the video below to hear the full conversation with New Haven Direct Connect’s Steve Thomas on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”