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
🤝 How he identified his weaknesses and found a business partner with experience in sales and finance
💶 Why Matthew was initially undervaluing both his products and himself
🚐 Building distribution through cold calls, shop visits and door-to-door selling across Cork and Kerry
🍰 Why Sibly moved away from cheesecake pots to focus on scalable, longer-life energy balls
🛒 Packing the company’s first Aldi pallet under a carport and winning a Grow with Aldi contract
📦 What happened when an order for two pallets quickly became four and then six
📈 Growing from approximately 1,000 pots a week to between 6,000 and 8,000 almost overnight
🧠 Why Sibly’s first major hire gave Matthew the headspace to pursue bigger opportunities
🗺️ The importance of building distribution geographically rather than expanding everywhere at once
🏷️ Understanding rate of sale and why getting onto a shelf is only half the battle
🥣 Why clean ingredients and consistent quality have become central to the Sibly brand
📱 Building consumer demand through community, social media, sampling and word of mouth
🏪 Growing to approximately 800 outlets across Ireland
🚀 Producing 32,000 pots in a recent week while maintaining the same product quality
💰 Sibly’s targets of €3.5 million in 2026, €5 million in 2027 and close to €10 million by 2028
🌍 Why Matthew wants to saturate the Irish market before pursuing international expansion
🔁 The power of compounding and moving the business forward by a millimetre every day
💬 “Compounding sounds fancy, but it’s pushing it a millimetre forward every day.” – Matthew Collins
🔗 Links and Resources
Connect with Matthew and Sibly
The Sibly Food Co website (https://thesibly.ie/)
The Sibly Food Co on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/siblyfoodco/)
Matthew Collins on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/mattzzer/)
Learn more about Grow with Aldi (https://www.aldi.ie/grow)
Books Mentioned
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people-collins-classics-dale-carnegie)
The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne (https://shop.penguin.co.uk/products/the-hearts-invisible-furies-by-john-boyne)
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (https://www.thesecret.tv/products/the-secret-book/)
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