This former couple says splitting up saved their pizza company. Here’s why they and others found running a business with your ex doesn’t have to be a nightmare.

This former couple says splitting up saved their pizza company. Here’s why they and others found running a business with your ex doesn’t have to be a nightmare.

Cheese shortages might have been the final straw for Alex Wagner and Arwen Chen's marriage. In March 2021, the Suez Canal was blocked for six days by the container ship , causing huge . This led to major cheese shortages in Wagner and Chen's hometown in Taiwan, which imports most of its dairy products. "We're in the pizza business, so that brought a lot of stress," said Wagner. Wagner, 38, moved from Wisconsin to Taiwan in 2010 and soon started dating Chen, 33. From the beginning, their relationship centered on work. "We weren't that romantically compatible," Wagner said. "We just worked well together." They launched , a pizza-by-the-slice business, at a night market in Taipei in early 2012. Chen and Wagner got married in 2015. Wagner said that while the marriage was, for the most part, "good, steady, and easy," it "didn't have a lot of the other things that you'd expect in a romantic relationship." Several years later, Chen gave birth to the couple's child. At around the same time, they expanded their business into a . Ultimately, Wagner and Chen said, this new venture — and the resulting professional challenges, like 2021's cheese shortages — was "probably what