Ugly Noodle owner says being gluten-free doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy good pasta

When Lauren McLaughlin found out she was allergic to gluten and roughly 30 other foods, she understood why gluten-free food got a bad rap.

“A lot of it isn’t very good, and some of it is legitimately terrible,” the Elgin woman said with a laugh.

It was especially tough for a pasta-lover with an Italian mother who remembers making pasta by hand with her grandmother. “I didn’t realize my pull to pasta was so strong until I found out I couldn’t eat a lot of it,” she said.

The pull was so strong that she started her own brand of gluten- and allergen-free pasta called Ugly Noodle. After success at farmer’s markets in Elgin, Geneva, Wheaton and Wilmette last summer, McLaughlin in December opened a retail store in Geneva at 2600 Keslinger Road, Suite 15.

“When I made my own, I realized it was better than anything I could buy,” she said.

McLaughlin’s brown rice and sorghum-based pasta is made without eggs. So it's vegan as well as gluten-free.

The retail store sells a rotating selection of fresh, gluten-free pastas, in addition to dried pasta and a curated selection of mostly gluten- and allergen-friendly foods in what she describes as a “pasta deli.”

McLaughlin also sells online and has shipped pasta to all 50 states.

“December was way better than I expected, with people coming in and ordering online,” she said. “I’d love for this to become the original flagship retail shop and have others.”

The dream job

The 2008 Geneva High School alum went to DePaul University. After graduation, she moved to Australia to work as an au pair. That’s where the idea for Ugly Noodle was born, albeit as a pasta food truck.

While watching four kids all day, McLaughlin did the old exercise of figuring out what you would do for free to help choose a career. The answer for her was to make pasta and cook for people.

In the ensuing years, McLaughlin had a number of disparate jobs, from working in sales at a water park to selling tools.

“I wasn’t passionate about anything I was doing,” she said. “So I thought, why don’t I just actually do the thing that I’ve been thinking about since 2013? So I did.”

While she’s hoping to hire help soon, McLaughlin has been doing everything herself so far, from ordering, making and packaging the pasta to cleanup to working the counter and shipping her product.

“I used to work like a crazy person for a dream that was not mine,” she said. “When you do something that you would do for free anyway, it doesn’t feel like work. I know that’s super cliche, but it’s true.”

McLaughlin said while her path to making pasta wasn’t a straight line, the stops along the way better prepared her for life as an entrepreneur. They also instilled in her a mission to give back to the community.

Starting a nonprofit

After returning from Australia in the middle of a recession at home, McLaughlin took an unpaid internship in Texas.

She could barely do enough side hustles to get by and found herself on food stamps in the middle of a food desert with no access to healthy options.

“Having food scarcity in my life for the first time was really eye-opening,” McLaughlin said. “And that stuff got worse for people in the pandemic.”

In 2020, she created a 501c3 to help people living in food deserts. The Ugly Noodle Community Initiative gives a portion of sales from each pasta bag and donations from customers.

The charity has partnered with the Chicago Park District Foundation and The Love Fridges in Chicago. It will grow vegetables in garden plots and distribute them at no cost to people in Chicago neighborhoods without grocery stores.

“I’m not trying to say I’m gonna save the world with pasta,” she said. “But I believe food is a right and not something that you deserve or don’t deserve based on how much money you have.”