Principle of Hospitality · 2026-04-23 · 49 min
From a backyard tradition to one of Australia’s fastest-growing pantry brands, this is the story of Bippi. In this episode, Chelsea Ford sits down with Ben Circosta, founder of Bippi Foods, to unpack how a brand built on family, flavour and fire scaled from a home kitchen into a nationally recognised name. Launched at the start of COVID, Bippi was inspired by Ben’s Nonna Amelia and the Calabrian rituals of growing, preserving and sharing food. What began as a way to recreate that experience has evolved into a 16+ SKU range, now stocked across the country. Ben shares how he identified a gap in the market through in-store research, validated the product through blind taste tests, and scaled production while keeping everything in-house, from de-stemming chillies by hand to hot-filling jars, to protect quality at every step. We get into the realities of building a food brand today, sourcing locally and internationally, expanding a team across production, sales and marketing, and navigating retail from shelf placement to sell-through. At its core, this is a conversation about consistency, customer trust, and building a brand people genuinely advocate for.
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