As a Local Lao Brand Expands to Mariano's, Go Behind-the-Scenes of Their Preparation of Ready-to-Eat Meals

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Laos to Your House does exactly what it promises in its name: bring the flavorful, herbal, textural cuisine of the landlocked, mountainous Southeast Asian country of Laos to your home. The Chicago-based start-up ships frozen dishes across the country, but now they’re expanding further into their home city by partnering with Mariano’s to offer ready-to-eat meals in the prepared food section of twelve grocery stores.

“We know we have the product,” says Stacy Seuamsothabandith, who founded Laos to Your House with her brother Keo Seuam and husband Byron Gully. But the decision to carry their food by Mariano’s employees who “know what will sell, what won’t sell – it’s further validation.” 

Five different Laos to Your House dishes are available at Mariano’s: vegetarian and pork nam khao, or crispy rice salad; gang phet, or red chicken curry; vegetarian and pork kua mee, or caramelized rice noodles; chunky-ground, herbaceous sausage known as sai oua; and seen savanh, a marinated “beef snack” similar to jerky. There’s also the chili-based dipping sauce jeow bong. 

“We wanted to make sure that we didn’t tweak our recipes,” says Seuamsothabandith. They had already developed recipes that would freeze and ship to customers around the country without compromising the dish, so they narrowed their selection down to more “approachable” meals for Mariano’s, where someone utterly unfamiliar with Lao or Southeast Asian cuisine might stumble upon it.

“I didn’t want anything that’s fermented fish up the wazoo” for the grocery stores, Seuamsothabandith says with a laugh. “I’m really proud of what we presented because it still is absolutely our true culture, our true cuisine, our true recipes, but making it where someone who’s never tried it before will want to try it.”

So how do you mass-produce Lao food – or really, any food – to be sold from a grocery store ready to eat after a quick warm in the microwave or the oven, while ensuring quality and integrity of the dish? 

Because of packaging and cold-chain technology, the Laos to Your House team’s preparation isn’t all that different from what you would find in a restaurant kitchen or a banquet hall. Laos to Your House rents space at The Hatchery, the food and beverage incubator backed by Rick Bayless in East Garfield Park. Their dedicated kitchen area is full of stainless steel surfaces, ingredients and tabletop appliances tucked under counters, a row of cold storage, and a cooking area with an industrial hood. It’s staffed by the Seuamsothabandith siblings, Gully, and their one employee, Arely Basilio.

They tackle one recipe at a time, cooking and portioning it by weight into individual plastic containers that are then sealed with plastic film by a machine that injects the container with a mix of nitrogen and oxygen in order to make the food last longer. (The industry term for this is MAP, or modified atmospheric packaging.) For the crispy rice, they combine cooked rice with aromatics, coconut milk, and eggs before forming it into softball-size spheres that are deep-fried to crispy edges. Once cooled, those spheres are broken, revealing still-soft rice on the inside, portioned out, and topped with more herbs and seasoning.

The caramelized rice noodles involves cooking down sugar with aromatics before sauteeing the noodles in the sauce. The seen savanh and sausage are both made the same day, since they both involve raw meat. The sausage is ground and stuffed into natural casings in-house, then cooked and portioned into containers with sticky rice, the accompaniment – and often utensil – for many Lao dishes. Beef is sliced, marinated, and briefly air-dried before being fried to lock in the remaining moisture for the seen savanh. (It can’t officially be called “jerky” because it’s not fully dehydrated.) The one dish that receives a modification for shelf life is the curry; the broth is served in a cup within the package, to be poured over the vegetables and chicken by the consumer.

A state health inspector certifies Laos to Your House’s processes and workspace at The Hatchery. If the company expands to Mariano’s stores beyond state lines, as is their goal, they will have to receive a USDA grant of inspection.

The Hatchery also provides cold storage space and a loading dock, allowing Laos to Your House to contract with a truck driver to deliver their meals to Mariano’s locations across the city, while the core team handles lower-volume, more geographically compact deliveries to a few Foxtrot locations themselves. 

The whole process is in service of the mission of Laos to Your House: “To make it where Laos is no longer the forgotten Asian country,” in Seuamsothabandith’s words. Her parents and siblings fled Laos in the mid-1970s due to unrest there; her sister was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. They made their way to the United States thanks to an uncle who had arrived earlier and joined the U.S. Air Force, then sponsored a number of Lao refugees to follow him. Seuamsothabandith is the only sibling born in America. 

She grew up in the Quad Cities on the border of Illinois and Iowa and moved after college to Chicago, where she was disappointed by the lack of Lao food. “That was how the concept came about: ‘How can we live in the third-largest city in the United States and not have a Lao restaurant?’” she says. (One, Lao Der, opened last year.)

She enlisted her brother, who had trained as a chef, and her husband, Gully, who had no background in the food industry. They started selling meals to go in 2022, operating out of a shared kitchen and only prepping meals every other week or so. But interest picked up, and they eventually decided to invest personal savings to expand and begin shipping nationwide through a partnership with FedEx. Then they found their way into a few Foxtrot stores after that chain imploded and reopened under different owners. They started selling in Mariano’s in February. 

“The goal was never to create a brick-and-mortar restaurant,” says Seuamsothabandith. “I wanted to be where we could reach the most people,” which for her meant not being confined to a single neighborhood by a restaurant. 

Gully supports his family’s drive, despite being an outsider to Lao food himself. “I’m probably a little biased, but never have I had a cuisine” like it, he says. “It’s so much good going on.”

Lao food shares some flavor profiles with the cuisine of neighboring Thai land, particularly in the use of herbs; aromatics like galangal, lemongrass, and makrut lime leaves; chiles; and fish sauce. It utilizes fermentation to add depth – although Laos to Your House mostly avoids such pungent flavors in their meals for grocery stores. And it offers a variety of textures, from sausage with large chunks of aromatics to crunchy rice to soft noodles.

Its uniqueness is a large part of why the family behind Laos to Your House wants to share it with Chicago and beyond. “To see Lao cuisine in the main grocery aisle,” says Gully, is “the execution of our mission beyond what we could think.”