Name:
Liam White
Age:
33
Job title:
CEO and Co-Founder
Company and location:
Dr. Will’s.
We’re based in London, but our condiments make their way onto a lot of plates beyond it - in Waitrose, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Co-op and Ocado across the UK.
We also expanded into Ireland last year via Tesco, and the UAE, and we’re starting to look seriously at the US market.
Education:
University of Bristol - engineering mathematics
Favourite food/drink:
If you forced me to choose a death row meal, it’d be a tie between a perfect burger (Bleecker is my number one in London) and a massive plate of sushi.
Honestly, though, I struggle to eat any meal without our Sriracha Hot Sauce on the side.
What inspired you to enter F&B?
Food has been part of my life from the start. My mum’s a food writer, so I grew up surrounded by restaurants and chefs, and food was always a huge part of our world. My godfather was Keith Floyd, a larger-than-life chef and TV personality, so I was lucky enough to be around some incredible food people from a young age.
At the same time, I grew up as a track and field athlete, which meant I was constantly checking the labels on everything I ate. When I looked at the US market, I could see they had much better condiment alternatives than we did in the UK.
The supermarket aisles here were dominated by big brands that hadn’t meaningfully evolved in decades, and that felt like a real opportunity.
Tell us about your role:
The simple version - which I love using on friends because of the reaction it gets - is: “I make ketchup.”
The longer version is that I set the direction for the business, but I’m also involved in pretty much every area of it, and I tend to gravitate towards wherever our biggest challenges are at any given moment.
Over time, as I hire more brilliant people, I’m focusing more on the big strategic stuff. There’s a quote from another founder whose aim was to make himself the worst person in the business because he was hiring so many great people. That’s something I genuinely aspire to.
What does a typical day look like?
It’s a cliché, but no two days are the same. I spend most of my time at our office in Vauxhall, although I do travel quite a bit. A fairly typical day involves a stack of meetings, be that with retailers, investors, brand partners, influencers, or a whole mix of people in between. I try to block out time to hyperfocus too, because that’s when the real thinking happens.
In the evenings, I’m often out spending time with interesting people - investors, other founders, all sorts. I don’t love the word ‘networking’, but meeting great people and learning from them is really important to me.
How did you get to where you are today?
Resilience is definitely my superpower. We’ve made tonnes of mistakes along the way, but we just kept going through all of them. Sport taught me the value of putting the work in and refusing to give up long before business did. Throughout it all, we’ve continually improved our product and got better at communicating that to customers. I think if you keep going whilst doing those two things, eventually you’ll flourish - provided you have a great product (and a great team!).
When you’re having a bad day, what cheers you up?
Getting outside. I used to be a competitive athlete, and I still love getting out for a run or a cycle. There’s not much a long ride or a Sunday run won’t fix. Especially in summer, I love the long evenings - getting out on the bike after work for a couple of hours is one of my favourite things in the world.
Beyond that, it’s the team. We have a great group of people that I genuinely enjoy working with, although they do have me doing increasingly ridiculous things for what they assure me is marketing purposes. It’s hard to stay in a bad mood when you’re dressed as a bottle of ketchup interviewing strangers in Soho.
And, predictably, a great burger fixes most things.
What’s your favourite part about the food sector?
The tangibility of it. You can spend a year sweating over a recipe, the artwork, the listing, and the launch, then walk into a Waitrose and see someone you don’t know put your bottle into their basket. Even better is seeing people sit down to a meal, dig into your mayo, ketchup, or hot sauce, and genuinely love it - food brings people together around the table. That’s something you just don’t get as a tech founder.
If you could change one thing about the F&B sector, what would it be?
More shelf space for challenger brands. The big incumbents have had things their way for decades, and the categories that most need shaking up - condiments, sauces, store-cupboard staples - are still dominated by products that haven’t meaningfully changed in 40 years.
Retailers are getting braver, which is fantastic, but there’s still a long way to go. Brands willing to back better ingredients deserve a fairer crack at shelf space.
What’s next for you/what’s the dream?
In the short term, it’s about continuing to grow in the UK. I want Dr. Will’s to be the healthier, tastier alternative available on every shelf where you find traditional condiments - the go-to brand people instinctively reach for.
Longer term, I’d love for us to achieve that globally, but right now I’m very focused on building a genuinely scalable business and nailing the UK first.
