Dinner should be a snap, but any parent will tell you it isn't always with kids.

"The challenge I had was I would want to make this amazing meal for myself, but my daughter would just want pasta with butter," Elissa Brown, of Milford.

Brown texted her friend Callie Bundy, who has a background in fitness, sports and nutrition.

"And I said, 'Hey, maybe just add some protein powder to it?' I was being comical obviously, right? So, then the next day we woke up and were like, 'That's actually a great idea. Let's make a high protein pasta sauce,'" Bundy said.

That was three years ago. But both moms got busy so the idea went on the backburner until about a year ago.

"Elissa's actually a good cook so she started batching out recipes of what we kind of thought we wanted to do and how we would make it. And then we didn't know how to cook beyond one pot for someone, right?" Bundy explained.

"That's when we brought our chef, Stephen Roth, on board. He perfected the recipe for us, and fast forward three weeks ago, we launched strong-sauce.com, and here we are," Brown told News 12.

Roth is a classically trained French chef, while Brown has 15 years working in advertising and marketing, and Bundy is an influencer with her own website and brand.

"Each of us has a very particular set of skills," Brown said. "So, it was kind of the perfect trifecta of all of the things we needed in order to launch a brand that we hope will be very successful and in everyone's homes."

Strong Sauce is high in protein and plant-based. The protein comes from quinoa, red lentils and garbanzo beans.

"For regular pasta sauce, you only get about a gram of protein per half a cup. For ours, you get 7 grams of protein for half a cup," Bundy said. "It's easy. It's delicious. It's healthy, and it is a complete protein."

"It's a very versatile sauce," Brown added. "It's not just like that Sunday sauce on pasta like grandma used to make. You can make pizzas, you can braise beef in it."

And perhaps most important, Strong Sauce has gotten the approval of Brown's daughter. "I made it in lasagna one night, and I didn't tell her, and she ate the whole thing," Brown said.

Her daughter's softball teammates were also fans during a team dinner.

Production has since moved from Brown's kitchen to Onofrio's in New Haven. You can buy it on the Strong Sauce website, but the hope is to see it in stores soon.

"Our goal is really to keep the momentum up, educate people about why we're different, right? Why we are a solution in a jar. It's saving moms, parents, athletes, people - time in the kitchen," Brown said.

"To make a jar of Strong Sauce, it would take you about three hours. All you have to do is come home, open it, and then make whatever you want to pour it over," Bundy told News 12.