THIS MAY GET A LITTLE CHEESY.
Hi! I'm Lauren.
I'm the founder of LOCA. I wanted to make a cheese sauce that tastes just like the jarred stuff you might have grown up eating - minus the dairy. So I created LOCA - a potato-based cheesy sauce for modern times.
Growing up in the American South, I was raised on a meat-and-dairy diet that considered macaroni & cheese a vegetable. I ate my way through Arkansas cheese dip, Memphis barbecue, and New Orleans seafood before moving to San Francisco and (after a good fight!) thriving on a plant-based diet.
Intrigued by my new lifestyle, my friends and family back home began transitioning to plant-based diets of their own—but made it clear that cheese sauce was something they could never give up (and I don’t blame them).
(Photo, right: Holding the first plant-based nacho offering on the menu at Oracle Park, made with LOCA and Impossible!)
CHEESE DIP IS A FOOD GROUP.
As they searched for dairy cheese sauce alternatives in their local stores, they found limited options, most of which were nut-based and refrigerated. That’s when I decided to pivot my career to focus on the mission of making plant-rich, cheese sauces that everyone can enjoy.
I spent the first year making the product by hand in a commercial kitchen, selling the sauce into some west coast sports arenas and campuses lIke Oracle Park Baseball Stadium (Let's Go, Giants!), NVIDIA Corporate HQ and The University of San Francisco, Good Eggs and a handful of retailers. Today, we've grown into a small, but mighty team and have partnered with amazing manufacturers to make our sauce in bigger batches so we can ship it to you nationwide and bring our sauce to a grocery store shelf near you! ✌️❤️🌱