Photo: Neighbors of the Wasatch Back // Sarah Severson.

There’s something endlessly fascinating about twins—at least for those of us who didn’t grow up sharing a womb. The notion that two lives can begin in a single moment, that two people can enter the world side by side, feels almost mythic. We wonder: Can they really read each other’s minds? Do they invent secret languages? Have they ever swapped places for a test? The mystique is hard to resist. And while much of the lore surrounding twins may be more fantasy than fact, for one pair from Heber, their bond wasn’t just a biological coincidence—it was the beginning of something much bigger. What started in utero has since grown into a global brand.

For Lauren Allen and Liz Haslem, the obsession with food started in their mom’s Park City kitchen, perhaps by necessity but always delivered with love. “In our parents’ early marriage, they had five kids, and my dad—who was a dentist—went back to medical school, so they were always penny-pinching, and that’s kind of where my mom’s cooking from scratch began,” says Liz. “It was just the cheapest way to do it; she made absolutely everything from scratch. Jams, breads, every dish.” Lauren agrees and adds that they—as the girls in their traditional family with three older brothers—were expected to help, and it was in those moments where the joy of cooking fused their future. “Our whole family, Mom’s parents, their parents, we’ve come from a long line of cooks and big families. It was normal for our mom to cook Thanksgiving for 60 people with 30 pies and multiple turkeys. Every holiday, just masses of people. My mom loved hosting and preparing food, and so we loved being there with her.”

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After the sisters graduated from high school in 2006, college took each of them on their own trajectory. They were roommates at Brigham Young University—Lauren pursued a journalism degree, while Liz followed her passion for health and exercise science, earning a master’s degree in education, and eventually teaching at her and Lauren’s alma mater, Park City High School (PCHS). Lauren dove into the realm of online technology in pursuing her journalism degree. “There was a new media-design program, learning the technology behind blogging and online web development; all my classes were HTML and Adobe Suite products. I loved Photoshop and photography and just became immersed in that world,” she says. At the time, it wasn’t clear how all these interests would eventually unfold, but the challenge of one college experience was clear to them both.

“We were now living among friends who didn’t even know how to boil water,” laughs Lauren. “They were buying the worst products from the grocery store and eating in the cafeteria, and I thought, ‘We can do better than this, and with something that works for our budget.’”

Liz agrees. “We didn’t go off to college thinking we were great cooks. We got there and realized no one around us had basic cooking skills. And I think it was the people around us that pushed us into this role of, ‘Well, they know how to cook,’ and they started asking for recipes.” In that instant, Lauren realized that there were no recipes. “They’d say to us, how do you do that, and we were like, ‘I don’t know, my mom never wrote anything down. She just cooked.’” That awareness became Lauren’s aha moment; then, quite by accident, Tastes Better from Scratch (TBFS) was born.

TBFS was originally intended for the twins to document a lifelong passion for cooking and the love of family traditions their parents taught them. “We knew all these amazing family recipes and meals, and nothing was written down, and so it started as a desire to record that history for us and our children we hoped to have, just to have it documented online,” says Lauren.

And so, what started as a passion project initially presented itself as a weekly blog, and offering easy-to-make meals on a budget has transitioned from a college-era platform to become an industry leader across cyberspace, racking up millions of international followers across multiple social-media and online platforms, several cookbooks, and a company with a CEO and an impressive advertising income. But most importantly, it brought Lauren and Liz’s relationship full-circle and turned the enterprise into a true testament to an acclaimed sister act.

The trajectory was not a straight line, however. They both got married and started families of their own, so life took them in different directions, literally and figuratively. In 2012, Lauren moved with her husband to St. Louis, where he was to attend law school—and where budgets were tight. “I was still blogging, and he said, ‘Okay, you need to get a real job or make something of this,’” she laughs. At the same time, their dad was instrumental in taking the endeavor to the next step.

The two are quick to attribute their success to the unshakeable support from their parents, who taught them that nothing in life comes easy. “We grew up in a traditional household, but my dad was an only child raised by a single mom, and he was always empowering us and encouraging us that we would go to college, we would get a degree, and we would always be able to support ourselves,” Lauren says.

Liz concurs: “Everything was from the lens of a kid who knew that you don’t know what’s going to happen in your life. You need to be able to support yourself.” And so, in 2012, as Liz contemplated her career options in St. Louis, that reassurance from her dad proved pivotal. “I had taken a nanny job and had just learned that you could make money in advertising with your blogs, and he said, ‘What do you need to take this to the next level? You have all these skills, and I know you can do something with this.’”

With her father cheering from the sidelines and offering financial support, Liz took the next steps. “He had already gifted me with my first DSLR professional camera, which just leveled everything up. And now, I could move my blog spot forward to build my own website, have my own domain and hosting, and make it look really professional. I knew that was how I was going to look good enough to get traction and really tap into the other social-media platforms, like Pinterest, where you would really get noticed,” she says.

At the same time, Liz had gone from teaching at PCHS to relocating with her husband to Ohio. “Lauren had called me in 2010 when I was getting my master’s and was teaching and said, ‘You know, I think I can make money from this,’ and I had total faith in her. But I was thinking, ‘I have a real job here, you should go for it, but there’s no way I can keep up with this passion project in the middle of all this other stuff,’” she says, laughing. But in 2012, living in Ohio with her husband and kids, another phone call would shift Liz’s direction.

While Lauren created recipes and continued growing her TBFS online presence, she knew she didn’t have the technical bandwidth to juggle all the behind-the-scenes know-how to integrate newer social-media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram. “When we were growing up, there was MySpace, then Facebook, but I always hated social media,” she recalls. “So, I created accounts to grow our online audience, and it really started to take off. Now I’m taking it seriously, and we have a lot more traffic, and then I brought in my first professional auditor. He gave me a laundry list of things to do to get seen, improve our page, and our speed and visibility, and recommended things like a mobile app, and it was just so overwhelming. And so, I called my sister. Along the way, Liz was always encouraging me.”

“We talked all the time,” Liz remembers. “At that point, my husband had finished his MBA, and I knew that teaching in Ohio might not pay the bills for two kids in daycare. And, so I said, ‘I can help.’ And, as it turns out, I learned I really love the side of the business that she hates. But Lauren had already done a great job building this into a legitimate business.” Lauren had incorporated TBFS in 2014, and in 2017 brought Liz in full-time. That year, they also hired a social-media manager, and the business has grown to include Lauren’s husband as CEO, as well as five other full-time employees, to handle all the facets of a business with more than 10 million international followers. “I learned you need to give up the things that you hate, you aren’t good at, or bring in somebody that could do it better than you,” Lauren muses.

In addition to a growing online audience, TBFS has amassed recognition from dozens of media outlets, with mentions and links to national publications like USA Today, HuffPost, ABC News, and the LA Times, among many others. The website (www.tastesbetterfromscratch.com) has evolved as a reliable resource for easy and free access to more than 1,200 recipes, each one curated and created by Lauren, with new recipes uploaded weekly.

TBFS includes recipes for every occasion and meal type, including appetizers, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, salads, soups, breads, and desserts. Visitors can select full meal pans, complete with shopping lists, and can incorporate popular kitchen appliances like air fryers, slow cookers, and instant pots. There are options for vegetarian meals, high-protein and low-carb diets, and a seasonal collection featuring her most popular dishes, including a holiday turkey feast that annually generates thousands of downloads and has been ranked the number-one Thanksgiving recipe online since 2017. Users can subscribe to a weekly email blast, which shares new recipes and can be curated to specific interests.

The sisters’ mission is always to make meal-planning and time in the kitchen enjoyable, affordable, and approachable. “Our mission is to always bring joy back to cooking, and we develop our recipes to be approachable for every skill level and any level of cook,” Lauren says. From basic burgers to breakfast dishes, the site is not without a level of flair and includes recipes curated from Lauren’s extensive travels through Asia, Mexico, and Spain.

“We did a study abroad in college, and we lived with a Spanish family with a mom who loved to cook, and every night, we’d sit together with my notebook and write out her recipes, which she would recite to us in Spanish. And so, when we got back to the States, I decided I wanted to make dishes and recipes like paella approachable for everyone.” Other international recipes, like tortilla de patata, pay homage to her time living in Barcelona and Madrid, and Mexican favorites like tamales, mole, and Mexican rice from her months living in Puebla, Mexico. That passion for travel is reflected on the website, where Lauren shares three- and four-day travel itineraries to Southeast Asia ports, as well as curated US routes, which include local flavors and cuisine hotspots.

The brand has added cookbooks to their cache, including the original Tastes Better from Scratch Cookbook, which, according to Lauren, was “ inspired by the vintage Betty Crocker cookbooks popular with our moms,” as well as four Macro season-specific e-books, designed for health-conscious cooks, detailing serving size and nutrition information. Their Taste of Europe digital book showcases Lauren’s love of food culture and is their newest title in their library.

These days, the twins and their families (Lauren has four children, Liz has three) live within a few miles of each other in Heber Valley, a promise they both made to one another from the start. “I got tired of not having any family around, and the cold in St. Louis,” Lauren recalls. “And then my husband started to work for Boeing in Arizona. And slowly the business continued to grow, and eventually he came on as our CEO.” Similarly, Liz and her husband found themselves working from home during Covid and realized they could work from anywhere, so they relocated to Arizona to be near Lauren and her family. It was a road that would eventually lead them both back home to Utah, cozying up in the Wasatch Back. “We kept our promise,” says Lauren.