Thomas Edison claimed failure was “the condiment that gave success its flavour”. For John Stapleton, the failure of one food business certainly adds a twist to his more successful food startups.
“You can’t build a career on failure," he says, "but it helps to have experienced it. It makes you better and spurs you to work harder, if nothing else to make sure you never have to experience that feeling again.”
Stapleton is regarded as one of the UK’s great food entrepreneurs. He’s built two huge food businesses and is now an adviser and investor to startups. He’s applied new, innovative technology to revolutionise food retail for ever.
He recently spoke at a Helm special guest dinner. Helm is a members-only club for the founders of innovative, fast-growth scale-ups worth more than £1m.
Written in the soup
It’s tempting to see Stapleton’s success as inevitable. But it wasn’t. It all started in a food science laboratory at Reading University in 1987, where he was gradually – if reluctantly - heading towards a life in the lab as an industrial microbiologist. That was before he spent an afternoon in the pub with Andrew Palmer.
Palmer was an entrepreneur who came to the University, which is world-renowned for its food science research department, because he had an idea about selling chilled, fresh soup. At the time the options for soup at home came in a tin or you made it from scratch yourself. Palmer had confidence that a chilled, fresh middle ground would be popular, but he didn’t have a clue how to do it.
Enter the young, entrepreneurial food scientist. If it now seems inevitable Stapleton would solve this challenge, the problems and dangers at the time were very real. Supermarkets were concerned this new approach to soup could potentially poison or even kill customers. As Stapleton admits, he didn’t know what he didn’t know when he accepted the challenge to join Palmer.
“Ignorance is bliss when you’re innovating. You start to climb this mountain and you’re halfway up before you realise how steep it is.”