About Us

Hello, We're Zing!

We work in collaboration with some of your favourite chefs and food creators across North America to bring the secret sauce to your home cooking — quite literally. Our one-of-a-kind sauces and seasonings are designed to be pantry shortcuts: single ingredient flavour-boosters that can instantly elevate the flavour of whatever you’re making.

Just add Zing (and if you want, nothing else) to season any protein, veggie, or carb and make brag-worthy meals in as little as 15 minutes, without breaking a sweat.

We Celebrate Third-Culture Flavours 

Our flavours are familiar, but new. Our "pantry shortcuts" share our point-of-view on third-culture flavours, so nothing that we make is "typical" or "traditional." We are inspired by the culinary scene found in restaurants across the world's urban centres like Toronto, where it's not uncommon to find a French restaurant using miso in their cassoulet or a Hakka-Chinese restaurant using spices traditionally associated with Indian food, like cardamom or cumin in their stir fries. We believe food has the ability to tell so many stories about who we are, where we're from, and where we're going. 

Learn more about third-culture cooking in this essay.

Home Cooking Needs an Update

We created Zing because we were among the majority of home cooks that spend the better part of an hour preparing a weeknight dinner — an hour we didn’t have, for meals that often lacked a punch of flavour. Meal prepping helped speed things up, but often came at the cost of variety and exciting flavours. Takeout a few nights a week? It started to add up (for our wallets, and our health.)

As people who love going to restaurants, have stacks on stacks of cookbooks, and spend more hours than we’d like to admit scrolling for #dinnerinspo, why was making ourselves a delicious, home cooked meal on the regular such a pain point? We realized it’s because our expectations and reality are totally out of sync.

How we approach home cooking hasn’t changed in decades, even though our expectations of what makes a delicious home cooked meal have.

We’re spoiled for choice. You can travel the world on a plate in a single day if all you did was eat out — maybe a croissant for breakfast, a taco for lunch with your work pal, and dan dan noodles at that cool new restaurant in town for dinner! But recreating that variety at home is not always easy — it takes skill, speciality ingredients, time and specific knowledge that isn’t always accessible to everyone. And don’t get us started on the mental load of prepping and planning before we get to the actual cooking part.

We just don’t have the luxury of spending hours in the kitchen day-to-day with our busy lifestyles, so why hasn’t the way we cook adapted to how we live?

It’s a shame that home cooking is becoming another ‘chore’ and we are on a mission to change that. We want to create a world in which people can look forward to preparing a home cooked meal not just when they're entertaining, but on an average weeknight! Let’s get pumped about hump day dinner, folks!

We hope that the concept of pantry shortcuts — inspired by our friends in restaurant kitchens and developed in collaboration with chefs and creators — can not only lower the barriers to trying and enjoying a diversity of flavours, but also help home cooks build confidence in their skills over time, minus the pressure and anxiety that comes with “So, what’s for dinner?”

Meet our Founders

Zing is a proudly South-Asian owned, Toronto-born and woman-led company. We each come from decade-long careers in tech, brand/marketing, and the restaurant industry and share a passion for all things food!