Sap’s Puddin’ already had a small following; nearly everyone who tastes it becomes immediately addicted. He served it as the featured dessert at Baywood Greens restaurant, where he worked for more than four years.
Little did he know that gourmet rice pudding would be his ticket. Sapienza has converted the garage at his log home in the woods, between Millsboro and Georgetown, into a state-of-the art, Food & Drug Administration-approved, pudding-making kitchen.

He says becoming his own boss as owner of SJ Foods LLC and running his own business was a hard transition. “I had been employed full time, with a steady paycheck, all my life,” he said. “I was doing what I had not done.”

Now, with outlets all over the state, including Lloyd’s Market in Lewes, Sapienza makes 350 to 500 pounds of pudding each week.

He has also taken the original recipe and created pudding flavors, including a new one introduced for the holiday season – eggnog pudding, made with Lewes Dairy products.

Through trial and error, and a lot of sampling, Sapienza has developed making rice pudding to a science. He developed his own cooling station, made from an old salad bar stand he bought on eBay, and he invented his own process to extend the shelf life of the pudding.

He said all he has to do is make contact with the right person and get some of Sap’s Puddin’ in their mouth. The pudding sells itself.

But it’s not always easy to get in the door and find the right person.

He says it’s a lot of legwork, requiring tremendous patience. “It took me six months to get into Harris Teeter,” he said.

Sapienza is currently working to expand his market to the Wilmington-Philadelphia area and may hire a consultant to help him with marketing.

Sapienza used assistance from the Delaware Department of Agriculture marketing team to get his new business up and running.

He also appears at most large events in the area and sold his rice pudding at the Rehoboth Beach and Fenwick Island farmers markets. He wants to expand to the Lewes and Bethany Beach markets this summer because sales at the markets are brisk.

He handed out samples at the Delaware State Fair and won first place in the professional chef dessert competition with a crème brulée rice pudding recipe at this year’s Punkin Chunkin.

Sap’s Puddin’ is unique. He uses only local Lewes Dairy products, which provide a creamier flavor, and all-natural products, including golden raisins and real vanilla beans with no artificial flavors or colors.

He also has a secret method of cooking rice prior to adding it to the pudding mix.

It contains no trans fats and is also gluten free.

Sapienza said has used the basic recipe for more than 15 years. “It’s a mixture of mine and my family with a little tweaking here and there,” he said.

When he’s not making pudding in his garage-turned-professional kitchen, Sapienza has time to plan for the future. He hopes to develop a chocolate rice pudding in the near future – a lot of people are waiting for it, he says – and perhaps open his own retail store modeled after Miami (Fla.) Rice or Rice to Riches in New York City.

He came close to turning over his recipe to a company that would mass distribute his rice pudding.

“But I had trouble doing that and was not sure the quality would be maintained,” he said. Sapienza said he could have become bitter losing his job as chef at Baywood Greens, but he said that would have been counterproductive.

“It all happens for a reason,” he said.