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Among the brands to have entered the Den is Pasta Evangelists. Co-founders Finn Lagun and Alessandro Savelli’s time on Dragons’ Den aired in 2018, seeking £75,000 in exchange for a 2.5 percent equity stake in the business. Pasta Evangelists makes artisanal fresh pasta, which is available for home delivery and subscriptions.
During their pitch five years ago, the duo said that within the past 18 months, they had sold cumulatively more than 22,000 portions of pasta to more than 4,500 customers across the UK.
Getting a flavour of the business, Dragon Peter Jones asked how the pasta differed from offerings sold in supermarkets.
Alessandro replied: “You will not find those types of pasta in the supermarkets,” and added: “We’re making products which you can’t compare like-for-like.”
The duo explained that at that point, they had raised to date £500,000, and they were working on a fundraising round of £1.7million.
At hearing the capital which needed raising, Peter said he was in “shock”.
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They said they thought they would break even in two years’ time, which at the time, would be the year 2020.
Not impressed by the one and a half percent equity he could end up with after further fundraising, Touker Suleyman said: “You don’t know about me do you? I don’t get out of bed for one and a half.”
Fellow Dragon Jenny Campbell also had doubts. She told the co-founders she thought it was a “brilliant business lesson in how not to run and set up a business”.
She added: “I stopped writing because the numbers were raining down and it was just going disaster after disaster after disaster.”
Declaring she was out, the dragon claimed: “This is pasta le disaster.”
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All five dragons said they would not invest, with Peter Jones telling the duo: “This will be a new one on me if this works, so I’m going to say that I’m out.”
However, despite the dragons’ decisions in the den, Pasta Evangelists have achieved tremendous success.
In fact, on its website, Pasta Evangelists said they calculate that “around one percent of that evening’s viewers visited the Pasta Evangelists website straight after” and sales almost doubled shortly after the episode aired.
Express.co.uk spoke to the entrepreneurs earlier this year, with Finn recalling: “They tore us to shreds, they destroyed us and they didn’t give us the money.”
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The pair weren’t phased though and in February 2020, their e-commerce business was doing around £200,000 a month online. By March, they were taking about £900,000.
Finn continued: “The online business grew literally overnight and we were all hands on deck, packaging pasta overnight. Our sales grew about four or five times.
“Our traffic soared exponentially. We worked as hard as we could to serve as many customers as possible.”
Pasta Evangelists is stocked in Harrods, Ocado, Amazon Fresh and available on Deliveroo, as well as the three Market Halls in London.
By 2021, Pasta Evangelists had raised up to £4million, and was turning over £21million. In January 2021, the company was sold to the world’s largest pasta company, Barilla – for a reported £40million.
Finn told Express.co.uk: “It was quite a big increase. Had the Dragons joined us and invested £75,000 they would have had a big chunk back and made a nice return.
“That would have been a possible £800,000 back their initial investment.
“Their return could have increased 10 times based on those figures.”
Dragons’ Den returns on January 5, 2023 at 8pm on BBC One.
