March 2026 Food & Beverage Grant Awarded to Pizzeria Coco

We’re excited to announce the March $10,000 Business-Category: Food and Beverage Grant recipient. Congratulations to Emily Kwak & Christina Cord, co-founders of Pizzeria Coco.

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Jama Hernandez sat down with Emily and Christina for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

Jama: Hi everyone, my name is Jama Hernandez and I’m with WomensNet. And I’m so excited to introduce our March, 2026 grant recipients. We are so excited today to introduce Emily and Christina, with Pizzeria Coco. They are our business category winner, which as you know we featured food and beverage for this month. We appreciate the time that you have taken to talk with us today to share a little bit about your business. Emily and Christina, please tell us about your business and who or what inspired it.

Emily: We are a mobile pizzeria here in the DC Maryland Virginia metropolitan area. And we come directly to your event. We set up our tent, we fire up the oven, and we cook pizzas right in front of you. And we specialize in catering and community events, and that might be corporate catering celebrations to make your experience a memorable one for you and your guest. I grew up in a Korean American, first generation Korean American household. And food is how my family celebrated, connected, and showed love-and that’s just never left me. After years of being in the corporate world I just wanted something different. I always loved pizza. I wanted to challenge myself to make a really great pizza. But what I think happened out of that was I actually fell in love with the process of working with my hands. I just became really obsessed with the whole process and everything.

Back in 2023 I was visiting Korea and during that trip I lost my job. And I just remember one of the days we were visiting a Confucian Academy and I just had this huge gust of wind hit my body. And I just knew that my ancestors were telling me that everything was going to be okay. So I came home with a clear vision and I reached out to the Women in Pizza community to connect with a mentor. And another mentor helped me elevate my crafts on to the next level. I taught Christina how to make pizza, which was really huge, and had been making pizza for family and friends. And from there we did our first popup in the summer of 2024 and we fell in love with it. It was just so much fun. We haven’t stopped since then. And I think the main reasons we really love doing this is the people. The local community here-the pizza community. It is just connecting with them. And it’s pizza. It’s just always going to be fun. You can’t not have fun when you’re making pizza.

Jama: 100% agree! Fantastic, Thank you so much! Tell us what makes Pizzeria Coco unique and its approach different?

Christina: So there are a few things- I’ll start with the most straightforward answer, which is that we are two women who make pizza. And without spewing a whole bunch of numbers and stats, the food industry and the pizza world in particular are both heavily male dominated. So unfortunately, if I were to ask any of you or anyone else to picture a professional chef or even someone just cooking pizza in front of a pizza oven, chances are that no one would answer two women, let alone one. And so that’s why communities and movements like Emily mentioned, Women in Pizza earlier and Fork to Future and opportunities like the Corto Women Pizza Scholarship exist- they’re so important for representation and for support, and we’re really proud to be a part of those communities. And what we care about even more than just being in this space is why we’re a part of it.

We didn’t just start Pizzeria Coco to sell pizza, we built it to bring people together. And honestly, each event that we do reminds us that pizza doesn’t just feed people, it does build community. And at our events, people just naturally kind of drift toward us in the ovens. They think it’s really cool- they start to talk to us, talk to each other, even strangers, and they become friends with us and friends with each other. And we always tell everyone, and again, Emily mentioned it earlier, like, that’s what it’s all about is the people. That’s everything to us. And we also bring something deeply personal to this. And one example of that is our Seoul Street pizza. Emily created it and she created it to honor her Korean heritage. It’s delicious- it features house made, kimchi, chewy rice cakes and a sweet and savory gochujang glaze. It’s phenomenal. And it’s the pizza that most people come back to tell us how much they enjoyed it. And that means the world to us, especially Emily.

Jama: That sounds incredible! Tell us about a lessons learned story with your business.

Christina: So I have my original answer, but I’m going to give you a two-parter because I can relate it back to Sophie and Carla’s answer.  Carla mentioned learning as things happen and Sophie said unexpected things pop up. We’ve obviously run into a whole lot of that. Emily and I both come from business and tech backgrounds. So one thing that has helped us big time is something we call retro- it’s a retrospective after every single event that we do, which probably sounds ridiculous, but it’s a huge help. We go through what went well, what didn’t go well, and how we can do better. That’s been a huge help to us. Carla mentioned challenges, but that’s how you grow. I 100% agree. I know Emily does too. That’s huge for us, that is how we learn and grow. That’s something we’ve been comfortable with coming from the tech background. So it’s something we’ve put to work and has been a big help. And then my original answer has to do with WomensNet. It’s to start looking into funding as early as possible. That probably sounds ridiculous. As you’re starting out, I think it’s really hard. You got your head down and you’re just trying to survive. But as early as you can look into funding options- I wish we had have done that even earlier. We did it early on, but we should have done that from day one. Because it can be the difference between you taking your dream full time and really pursuing it and growing it or not. And the second part of that is, there’s so many resources and opportunities out there. Not just grants, but get creative with it, look at places that not everyone else is looking into. I know it’s hard starting out, but try to set aside some time to look into what’s out there and make a plan for how you can get funding. It’s going to be a huge help to you.

Jama: Great advice. Thank you for participating in this interview. We know you’re all very, very busy and so we appreciate the time that you carved out today to speak with us. And congratulations again.