EE512: The Food Founder’s Playbook - Matthew Collins, on Scaling Without Losing Quality

In this episode of The Entrepreneur Experiment, Gary Fox sits down with Matthew Collins, founder of The Sibly Food Co, the Irish snack brand that began with a €143 food shop and a stall at a local Christmas market.

Matthew shares how he went from making brownies, rocky roads and cheesecakes in his parents’ kitchen to building a brand stocked in approximately 800 outlets nationwide. Along the way, he taught full-time, baked through the night, delivered products shop by shop and even packed Sibly’s first Aldi pallet under his uncle’s carport.

He reveals the pivotal decisions that transformed Sibly from a college side hustle into a national food business: leaving teaching, finding a business partner with complementary strengths, moving away from short-shelf-life cheesecakes, winning a Grow with Aldi contract and reinvesting everything back into the company.

Matthew also breaks down the reality of scaling a food brand, from pricing and distribution to shelf space, rate of sale, hiring and protecting product quality as volume increases. With Sibly recently producing 32,000 pots in a single week and targeting €3.5 million in sales this year, this is a practical masterclass in building a consumer brand one shop, one customer and one small improvement at a time.

For founders building a food business, consumer brand or bootstrapped company, this episode is packed with honest, practical lessons from someone still deep in the journey.

🎧 Show Notes

In this episode, we cover:

🎄 How a €143 food shop and a local Christmas market started Sibly

🍫 Finding the gap between bland “healthy” snacks and heavily processed sweet treats

🏠 Growing the business from Matthew’s parents’ kitchen and a purpose-built unit in their front garden

🎓 Baking and delivering at weekends while working full-time as a teacher

☎️ The phone call that convinced Matthew to leave teaching and commit fully to Sibly