With a focus on Greater Philadelphia small businesses and entrepreneurs, "The Creators" is a weekly feature presented by PHL Inno. Check back each Monday for a new profile on a local business. Have a story you think we should know about? Email associate editor Lisa Dukart at ldukart@bizjournals.com.
For Bill and John Vesper, there were a lot of roadblocks on their way to launching a successful pasta sauce business. There were so many – from their limited handmade production capacity to the co-packer who, after a year of research and development, told them their recipe would require a preservative – that they very nearly thought it might never launch.
On the brink of packing it in in and attempting another venture, the twin brothers kept digging, believing theirs could be a recipe for success. And they were right.
A decade after launching, business is booming for the entrepreneurs behind Vesper Bros. Foods and now they have their sights set on the next phase of growth. That goal includes expansion to Whole Foods Market stores across the nation within the next two years.
Such lofty goals are a long way from where they started, selling their signature marinara – based on their paternal grandmother’s recipe and handed down through generations – at a weekly market outside their local Whole Foods in Devon.
Born and raised in Wallingford, their father is the longtime owner of Wayne staple John’s Village Market. Under his ownership for more than four decades, the twins grew up surrounded by not only food, but the entrepreneurial spirit.
Hailing from an Italian American family, cooking was a language all its own in their house, one they became fluent in early on.
“Your pasta sauce or gravy recipe is kind of like your family coat of arms. It's like your signature,” Bill said.
Whenever visiting their grandmother, Bill and John would watch and participate in small ways, picking up some of her techniques. Paired with their father’s deli, Bill said branching out in the industry was natural. “It was truly in our blood to start our own food business,” he said.
Still, the idea for Vesper Bros. Foods didn’t come to them immediately. Having joined the family business, John’s Village Market expanded from one location to three, spreading the family geographically. Close knit, the brothers missed spending as much time together and started to think up a spinoff business.
“We wanted to take the food that we had grown up making, sort of branch off the business together, and take some of our traditional family recipes to the world,” John said.
The idea occurred to them in 2010, following the Great Recession and experiencing first-hand the struggles of running a business through a financial downturn.
Diversifying seemed like a way “to expand this business, to draw customers into our brick and mortars, by also creating a new revenue stream,” Bill said.
They were also inspired by their father, wanting to make their own mark, just as he had done.
It seemed like a simple enough idea at the time: Take their family marinara recipe and bottle it. They knew the recipe was good and already had connections to food purveyors.
“We started the whole process, I think, with a lot of naivety,” admitted Bill.
After a year of planning and researching how to jar their sauce so that it would be shelf stable, the pair bought the largest canning pressure cookers, quickly discovering they could produce just 12 jars in an hour.
“I remember feeling sort of like somebody punched me in the gut,” recalled Bill, believing they would have to scrap their plans. But they held out hope and soon discovered co-packers.
The process began again, this time with a facility that could make and bottle the sauce for them – and much more quickly than 12 jars an hour. After another year of recipe development, the co-packer insisted on adding citric acid as a preservative.
“We were adamant from the beginning that it had to be the exact same ingredients that us, our mother, our grandmother used in our pots at home,” Bill said. They tried it, but ultimately found that it wasn’t right. "In our hearts, we knew that the integrity of our recipe was compromised, because there was an ingredient in that jar that we wouldn't use at home.”
They walked away and sought other co-packers. That proved the right move. Finding a co-packer in Chester County, also helmed by an Italian American family, the Vesper brothers began the process anew with a promise their family recipe wouldn’t be altered.
When the first samples came off the line, their grandmother agreed it was a match for her own sauce. Despite its flavor, she had reservations given how many sauces were already on the market.
The brothers were confident, though, and purchased 200 cases of sauce and Vesper Bros. at last launched sales in 2012, quickly gaining popularity. Stocked in local shops, they began setting the stage for bigger retailers. “We had always kind of known that … the future of the business was getting into some of the big retail chains. Whole Foods was one that we had talked about from the very beginning,” said John.
That summer, they began selling in the weekly market outside the Whole Foods in Devon, eventually connecting with the store’s grocery team leader. By the end of the year, their sauce was stocked on its shelves and has since expanded to the roughly 65 stores in the Mid-Atlantic.
They’ve done that without investors and with no other employees, though their father does help with bookkeeping. The brothers also still are heavily involved in the family business, which is now back to just the original deli in Wayne. As they grow, they hope to one day bring on employees.
Vesper Bros. has also expanded beyond its signature marinara – though it remains a top seller, with roughly 1,000 cases a month sold, or close to 150,000 jars a year – and is eyeing expanded distribution. “The goal for us is within the next year, or I would say by at least 2023, is that we will be in every Whole Foods across the country,” Bill said.
They also have wholesale agreements with Wegmans and ShopRite, as well as Price Chopper, a chain of grocery stores based in New York with a presence in northeastern Pennsylvania and Connecticut. They’ve even expanded internationally in Canada, Scotland, Spain and as far as Singapore.
Like other brands stocked at Whole Foods, they see a bright future ahead for Vesper Bros. “It's not like we created this unique kind of niche product – it's really something that is accessible to everybody,” Bill said, citing Justin’s Nut Butter as a similar example of success. “These are normal products – they didn't reinvent the wheel, they just made it better, and have a great story behind it, but now are these multimillion-dollar companies. And we think that we are positioned well to be one of them.”
How did the pandemic impact business?
JV: We did a lot of online selling, not just straight to consumer, but also to businesses. We ship directly through FedEx to businesses, mom and pop shops all over the country.
BV: Last year during the pandemic, the pizza sauce actually took off. We always sold a lot of pizza sauce, but that was neck and neck with the marinara in 2020. I think it was a product of people just not eating out, not going out and not ordering out. They were doing a lot of cooking at home.
What’s been Vesper Bros. growth trajectory?
BV: Year over year, we've had steady growth. It's tough to even say this, because so many small businesses really struggled a lot last year and we're really cognitive of it, but we did really well last year during the pandemic, because the supermarkets were just wildly busy. … We're hoping that even though it was some wild numbers last year, we're actually hoping that this year, we end up at least even with where we were last year, even though it was such a big jump.
How did you get the brand out there early on?
JV: We just started going in [to mom and pop shops] with a jar and just telling them our story, what we were doing and telling them how we got started. Communicating with people, it's something that we grew up doing in the deli, it comes natural to us to make quick friendships with strangers. Growing up in the deli we would learn people's names and learn what kind of sandwich they like. We use that skill that we had developed and learned just naturally in the deli to go out and just talk to people about this sauce and the product.
