Chicago Business Owner Went From Selling Products Out Of a Car To Distribution At Walgreens

Meet the Black woman entrepreneur who went from selling her frozen pudding out of a car in Chicago to securing major distribution at Walgreens.

Genesis Bencivenga Sr. took to TikTok late last month to post a tearful testimony of taking Lorenzo’s Frozen Pudding from the southside of Chicago to the shelves of major retail distribution.

“I’m from the southside of Chicago, from the LeClaire Courts,” Bencivenga captioned the video. “I Genesis Bencivenga Sr., has a product in Walgreens.”

The frozen pudding maker added an introductory caption over her video adding more insight into her growth as a business owner.

“Lil girl from the projects on the Southside of Chicago got her Southern-Style Frozen Pudding in Walgreens,” Bencivenga wrote over the video.

@lorenzosfrozenpudding I’m from the southside of Chicago,from the LeClaire Courts. I Genesis Bencivenga Sr., has a product in Walgreens. #Walgreens #truereaction @Walgreens ♬ original sound – LorenzosFrozenPudding

Bencivenga described the long journey to scaling the frozen pudding company. Her father, Lorenzo, launched Lorenzo’s Frozen Pudding back in 2011 as a way to bring in a new stream of income for their family, Walgreens Newsroom reports.

The family would hustle to sell the different flavors of the frozen pudding out of their car on the streets of Chicago. The family initially crafted the pudding in their kitchen before moving to a shared kitchen and selling to local Chicago retailers in 2013.

The business was going well but the father-daughter duo didn’t have enough resources to meet the rising demand. In 2015, Bencivenga reignited the brand after her father retired.

“We weren’t selling on the street anymore because we were in about 50 stores between 2015 to 2017,” Bencivenga told Walgreens.

“We were handing out samples and doing demos and it caught fire just like it did before. But we couldn’t keep up with demand again. I knew we had a great product people wanted to buy, but we didn’t have the back-end infrastructure for manufacturing and distribution that we needed, so I had to shut it down again.”

Now, with the support of Top Shelf, Lorenzo’s Frozen Pudding had secured distribution at Walgreens.