Fabio Zeppilli
Founder
Bad Monkey Popcorn & Zeppilli Group
On Fabio Zeppilli
abio Zeppilli built Bad Monkey Popcorn the way most food brands are built in Montreal: with limited capital, in spaces not designed for it, and on the conviction that a genuinely better product would eventually find its market. What sets his story apart is not the product itself — the popcorn is good, but popcorn is not a category short of options — but the route to retail: a deliberate path through farmers markets, food fairs, and direct consumer relationships that preceded any conversation with major grocery chains.
Bad Monkey Popcorn is now a fixture in Quebec's specialty food retail market. The brand's identity — irreverent, distinctly local, unmistakably Montreal — reflects Zeppilli's intuition that consumer food brands win or lose on personality as much as product. He has built accordingly. The packaging, the voice, the community presence are all expressions of the same sensibility: a brand that knows exactly what it is and refuses to sand down its edges in pursuit of mainstream appeal.
Under the Zeppilli Group banner, Fabio has extended his operator's instinct into adjacent ventures — a pattern of diversification that reflects a builder who is more interested in the mechanics of entrepreneurship than in any single category. The Zeppilli Group represents not a holding company in the conventional sense but a platform for serial execution: the discipline of building applied across different products, different markets, different problems.
In conversation on The Montreal Entrepreneur Podcast, Zeppilli is candid about the particular difficulty of building a food brand at the artisanal level. The economics of specialty food are unforgiving: margins are thin, shelf life is a constraint, and the capital required to achieve meaningful retail presence often precedes any return on that investment by a significant margin. He discusses these realities with the practicality of someone who has absorbed them without bitterness — and who has found a way to build despite them.
The broader lesson is one that applies across consumer categories: that small brands succeed not by competing with large brands on their terms, but by occupying territory that large brands cannot afford to defend. For Bad Monkey Popcorn, that territory is personality — a quality that commodity producers cannot manufacture and that is, ultimately, the most durable competitive advantage in a market crowded with technically adequate alternatives.
The product is the price of entry. The personality is the brand.
— Fabio Zeppilli
Key Takeaways
Consumer food brands win or lose on personality as much as product — Bad Monkey Popcorn's success in a commoditized category reflects a deliberate brand identity built from the ground up, not applied after the fact.
The path to retail in specialty food runs through direct consumer relationships — the farmers markets and food fairs that precede grocery chain conversations are simultaneously sales channels, market research, and brand-building.
Food brand economics are unforgiving at the artisanal level — margins are thin, shelf life is a constraint, and capital requirements routinely outpace projections for founders who underestimate the gap between retail presence and retail profitability.
Small brands succeed by occupying territory that large brands cannot defend — personality, provenance, and community connection are advantages that commodity producers cannot manufacture at scale.
Entrepreneurial diversification under a holding structure allows a builder to apply operator instincts across categories while maintaining distinct brand identities for each venture.
I didn't build Bad Monkey in a factory. I built it at a market table, talking to people who had never heard of me.
— Fabio Zeppilli
Every no from a retailer is information. The question is whether you're listening to what they're actually saying.
— Fabio Zeppilli
About Fabio Zeppilli
Fabio Zeppilli is the founder of Bad Monkey Popcorn and the Zeppilli Group. He built Bad Monkey Popcorn from a home production operation into a specialty food brand carried across Quebec's independent and select chain retail market. Under the Zeppilli Group, he has extended his entrepreneurial practice into adjacent ventures. He is recognized as one of Montreal's most distinctive consumer brand builders and participates actively in the city's entrepreneurial community.
Affiliations
- Bad Monkey Popcorn — Quebec Retail Distribution
- Founder, Zeppilli Group
