In the seventh and eighth episodes of the third season of FounderMetrics, Vestd founder and CEO Ifty Nasir sat with John Stapleton, co-founder of New Covent Garden Soup and Little Dish, for a double helping.
John discusses the early days of launching a fresh food brand, how to get your product into Waitrose, scaling a small team into a national success, and how to recover after failing to break into the US market.
Check out the main takeaways below, or click here and here to listen to the full episodes!
Episode 7:
Episode 8:
Some of your listeners may not remember a time before fresh soup was available. But in 1987, that concept didn’t exist - not in the supermarkets, anyway. I’d just come out of university with zero business experience.
But sometimes, ignorance is bliss. It meant I had no preconceptions, no fear. And that can be a real advantage when you’re trying to do something new.
My first project was the New Covent Garden Soup Company, which I co-founded with my business partner, Andrew. It was a baptism of fire. We knew nothing about retail, manufacturing, or distribution.
But we learned - quickly. And the business, commercially speaking, was a huge success. Starting like that can be dangerous, though. You get this false sense that success follows a formula. Do steps 1 to 5, and voila, you win.
That misplaced confidence sent me to the US to do it all again - this time with fresh soup in a carton for the American market. And it flopped.
I spent five years in California. I had a great time personally, but the business didn’t work. It should have - it really should have - but it didn’t. And failure, I believe, is a far better teacher than success ever could be. You learn humility. You learn how to lose. You know how to get back on your feet.
After that, I moved to Munich with my German wife. But I still wasn’t done with startups. So, I founded Little Dish - healthy, tasty, convenient meals for young children.
We launched it in the UK, despite my being based in Germany. I didn’t speak the language fluently, and frankly, the opportunities in the British food space were much stronger.
Little Dish worked. And that’s when I began joking that my career was like a sh*t sandwich - two slices of success with a big mess in the middle.
Those first 25 years - building from scratch, scaling, and exiting - were intense and transformative. And yes, Little Dish was a kind of redemption.
We faced massive scepticism in the early days of New Covent Garden. We were told by experts—people from Baxters and Campbells—that it wouldn’t work. But here’s the problem with experts: they’re experts in what’s already happened, not what’s about to.
We faced a Catch-22 early on. Apex, the VC we’d approached, liked us. They liked the idea. But they said, “Get a listing, and we’ll fund your factory.” Meanwhile, Waitrose wouldn’t give us a listing unless we could supply the product. But, as they say, ignorance is bliss. We didn’t know it couldn’t be done.
We managed to get a meeting with Waitrose. We brought them samples - soups we’d made in a glorified kitchen in Reading. No pitch deck, just passion and a product. And they loved it. They asked, “When can you launch?” I panicked and said September, thinking they meant next year. They meant this September. They gave us a six-month exclusive in 30 stores. We left the meeting high-fiving and then realised: we didn’t have a factory.
We called Apex and said, “We’ve got the listing.” The money followed, but even then, building a proper factory in time was nearly impossible. Somehow, we ramped up the Reading kitchen to 160% of its theoretical capacity. If Waitrose had visited, they might’ve shut us down on sight. But we made it work.
We eventually built a factory in Battersea - next to the old Covent Garden vegetable market. It wasn’t the cleanest or most obvious choice, but it gave us our name and some much-needed authenticity.
We always planned to sell. We didn’t want to leave a legacy business to our kids. It was about creating, scaling, and exiting. From around 1995, we started planning. I always recommend that you think about your exit before you’re ready. You’ll make better strategic decisions.
We sold in 1998 after 10 intense years. It was the right time. Then came the US, and it went wrong.
The process we used was capital-intensive. We automated early, with computer-controlled recipes, but our cost base was high. The California team at Apex knew little about food. They were caught up in the dot-com frenzy, and there was little appetite for a second investment in soup.
We made lots of mistakes, despite getting some things right. At one point, we were flying soup from London to San Francisco, then delivering it with a man in a van. It was bonkers - but we learned a lot.
Eventually, we had to shut it down. Chapter 11. Bankruptcy. That process taught me more than either of my successes. As the founder, you feel everything closing in on you. The self-doubt is brutal. But I promised myself I wouldn’t go out on a failure. I had to prove - to others, but mostly to myself - that I could succeed again.
Since exiting Little Dish in 2017, I’ve been more diverse in my work, investing, advising, and mentoring. Most of it is still in the food and drink sector. I’m involved in Mission Ventures, an accelerator for early-stage brands, and Reedsdale Food Fund in Dublin, which is purely investment-focused.
I’m also the chair of Fischer Farms, a vertical farming business that tackles food security through indoor, hydroponic agriculture.
In all of these ventures, I look for clarity of vision. If you’re building a brand, you need to know your customer. You can’t sell to everyone. You must define your audience - and answer the question: Why is their life better today because of your product?
Key metrics I always look at? Rate of sale. That’s your truth-teller. Repeat purchases are what build a brand. That’s when people vote with their wallets again and again. The rate of sale determines whether your product has real traction or not. Without it, nothing else matters.
One final lesson: don’t pretend. Be authentic. If you try to build a business by mimicking someone else, it’s ten times harder. But if you’re honest - about what you believe, what drives you, even what scares you - people will follow you. They’ll trust you. And you’ll attract authenticity in return.
People often talk about “the courage of your convictions.” That’s nice. But conviction without insight is just naive optimism. You need to know why you believe in what you’re doing. Then, and only then, can you convince others.
And remember: the opposite of success isn’t failure - it’s not trying. Fear of failure stops people from even starting. But failure, as painful as it is, can be the best place to have been - because it teaches you not to go back.
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