My First Million: Alessandro Savelli, founder, Pasta Evangelists

Alessandro Savelli, 40, recently sold his cook-at-home fresh pasta business for a reported £40m and has created 80 new jobs since March 2020. The former investment banker — and Dragons’ Den reject — launched Pasta Evangelists from his flat in 2016, using his grandmother’s pesto recipe for the first meal.

Two years later, on track for a £700,000 turnover, he was invited to appear on BBC2’s Dragons’ Den. The entrepreneur panel turned down his pitch for £75,000 in exchange for 2.5 per cent of the company.

Turnover has grown from £69,000 in 2017 to £10.5m in 2020. Based near King’s Cross in London, the company now has over 100 employees. The 18 fresh pasta dishes it offers cost between £7 to £11. Savelli forecasts customer numbers rising to 1m in 2021 from 400,000 last year.

After the sale in January 2021 of the company to Barilla Group, Savelli remains as chief executive, and shareholder, with co-founders Chris Rennoldson and Finn Lagun.

Did you think you would get to where you are today?
I didn’t know I would get to where I am now, but I had a dream to run my own business. At junior school I liked to sell toys and comics to my classmates for a small profit. My father is an entrepreneur and my mother is an English teacher.

The biggest influence has been my father, Daniele. One day he would come home and talk about investing in a smoked salmon factory. The next day he would talk about a medical instrument business in Israel he was keen to get involved in, then perhaps about investing in ancient art, partnering with a silver jewellery business in Indonesia or another time launching a dental products company in Italy and, why not, investing in some car parking spaces in Genova.

His “can-do” attitude allowed me to think that almost anything is possible. I also witnessed the risks involved in being an entrepreneur.

During my MBA, I was not afraid of jumping into the smartphone industry without knowing anything about it, or afterwards a pasta business without having worked in food. The learning curves were steep. My dad has been a constant support and mentor to me.

How has the coronavirus pandemic affected your business?
The pandemic boosted our sales enormously overnight. The first 10 days into the March 2020 lockdown, our sales increased tenfold. Consumers were purchasing more goods, groceries and provisions online, so ecommerce penetration accelerated. 

Yet we were massively worried about the general situation. As a manager I was concerned about the safety of my team. I did not work from home but I kept going to our facility every day to help and support the staff. Soaring sales came with their own challenges, and 2020 wasn’t easy.

Did you have to diversify to survive?
We did, by creating a completely new channel at the height of the first lockdown. Within Pasta Evangelists we formed a team to offer cooked pasta meals through Deliveroo. This team is now 30-strong and the new segment within the business has grown over nine months to 30 per cent of our revenues.

We were lucky because ecommerce was in such demand. While people could not go out and worried about the difficulties getting food or supermarket delivery slots, they turned increasingly to home deliveries. I feel we moved very fast and were agile enough to offer something delicious, that consumers really want, in response to changing market dynamics.

We wish to provide UK consumers with authentic Italian recipes that include unusual pasta shapes, sauces and fillings.

What did you have to sacrifice to start the business?
I had just come from my first business developing and selling mobile phones. It was unsuccessful, leaving me and the shareholders with nothing after eight years’ very hard work. If I was going to carry on as an entrepreneur, I had to focus on something that was close to my heart. I love cooking and I eat pasta every day. I started the pasta company the day after closing my previous business.

Was your first £1m a major milestone?
Our first £1m profit came in 2020, after booming sales. It was an exciting milestone, but my personal highlight has been joining forces with the biggest pasta company in the world, the Barilla Group. It was a thrilling moment. I am only a small piece of Pasta Evangelists’ puzzle, because I started out with two co-founders, Chris and Finn. Our strong performance has been an amazing team effort with people who are aligned, but with different experience.

What is the secret of your success?
Perseverance, but for me success has yet to come. I have a significant network, listen to many people, but at times, it is important to take counter-intuitive decisions. Many people have defined me as intense.

Currently, 70 per cent of our sales are through subscribers, from all over the UK, wanting a weekly pasta fix. Popular meals are orecchiette with pistachio pesto, gnocchi with basil pesto, pappardelle with beef shin and barolo ragu, and lobster tortelloni with sage butter and samphire. To date we have produced more than 200 recipes. Every week we have a new menu. I am personally involved in creating some of them.

I take inspiration from other people in our team, including Roberta, who is our official sfogliana — a pasta artisan. She runs our pasta masterclasses. Not only do we sell pasta but we are keen for people to learn how to make fresh pasta. Before the classes were in person, now they are online. We are putting on hundreds of events every year.

What was your best preparation for business?
Three things: my father, studying at Colombia Business School and having failed once.

The Dragons were a blessing in disguise. Though they did not invest in the business, the programme gave us nationwide visibility and the extra stimulus to prove them wrong. It was a very intense experience. You may only appear on screen for 10 or 15 minutes, but you are filming with them for one hour. I guess the Dragons didn’t really understand what we were trying to achieve. They would have increased their investment close to tenfold had they come on board.

What was the most challenging period of your career?
It would be when I closed my smartphone start-up. I had lost everything, and I was not sure what to do next. It was a lonely period. I was 36. It took a year to close the company. There are several reasons why we failed. The product was too complicated and creating a luxury brand was potentially over-ambitious. I had a passion for the business but limited personal affinity with the product, as it was targeted to a female consumer.

I realise that being an entrepreneur can be a long journey. When they say you should never give up, that is correct; what it really means is that you should not give up on the ambition to be an entrepreneur. You may first find yourself giving up a specific business that is not working.

What is your basic business philosophy?
Move quickly and behave like every penny is your own money. Time is of the essence. At the outset in 2016 I put in £2,000 myself, then we gradually raised increasing amounts of capital. In total we secured £6m to keep us growing, from a number of institutional and individual investors, including Prue Leith.

Do you want to carry on till you drop?
One hundred per cent. I will be in my role at Pasta Evangelists, I believe, for many years to come, with the ambition to build this into a sizeable international enterprise. Our dream is to launch into the US, but that will take some time. I love what I do. For me it is just the beginning. I have never thought about retirement. My pension is my ownership in the company.

Do you believe in giving something back to the community?
Since last year we have provided thousands of meals to The Felix Project, which delivers surplus food to charities and schools in London. Throughout 2020 and this year, for every box of food sold we have donated £5 to Age UK, and have so far raised more than £25,000. We have just partnered with Mind, the mental health charity, as well. Before the MBA I volunteered to work for Casa Guatemala, an orphanage based in the Guatemalan jungle, teaching English and maths to teenagers.

What do you consider as an indulgence?
I enjoy my private Boxfit lesson every Saturday morning on Clapham Common. It gives me a lot of energy as well as being a great distraction. I also like playing football. A few months back a player of the other team, probably 15 years younger than me, called me “old man”. I still managed to slide tackle him.