Growing up, having homemade chilli on the table was normal for Ben Circosta. For a Calabrian, Italian family, eating preserved chilli (known in Calabrian slang as “bippi”) was just a part of life.
“My grandfather would go to weddings back in the day with fresh chilli in his jacket pocket, so that he could cut up homegrown chilli onto the meal,” says Circosta. “It’s entrenched in our family, but a lot of Calabrians are just addicted to heat.”
Circosta’s nonna, Emilia emigrated from Calabria, Italy in the 1950s, moving to Mildura in far north-west Victoria. There, she and her growing family cultivated a classic, Italian-style market garden. They’d eat and share what they could and preserve what was left – including those oil-preserved chillies. They made them in traditional Calabrian style, which Circosta says differs from some of the other famous chilli oils.
“It’s a fresh chilli when you preserve it. With the Calabrian style, the first taste that you want to get is chilli. You want to actually taste the chilli, and a little bit of salt, a little bit of oil and a touch of vinegar just helps to increase the flavour.”
Calabrian home-style chilli, though, has a quality that’s hard to find outside the region. Circosta found that, beyond his nonna’s version, the options on supermarket shelves were thin. So he decided to make his own, based on Emilia’s, which he naturally called Bippi.
“It was about trying to build a brand that could have products that I grew up with, but also that you would find in Nonna’s pantry and that were common to Italians, to make them accessible to everyday Australians.”
Bringing Bippi to the people
Circosta started building Bippi from the ground up during the Covid pandemic, working out of his home kitchen and garage. Drawing on the flavours he grew up with, Circosta created a product worth the effort – but getting it out to a chilli-hungry audience proved challenging initially. While perfecting the product was one challenge, getting jars from his garage into kitchens around Australia was another. Starting out with just an online store, Circosta says he’s thankful for the support of shipping partners like Australia Post to help get his chilli to market.
“The best part was knowing that we could use Australia Post to send our product anywhere in Australia and internationally,” he says. “I’ve got a local post office around the corner from home that I can just drop the parcels off to. It was amazing how you could do something so locally but reach everyone all the way over in Perth or all the way over in North Queensland.”
Now, Circosta is expanding the Bippi brand from those OG jars of Calabrian chilli to a broader selection of Italian kitchen staples. While the chilli holds its own on supermarket shelves, Circosta says that online orders sent out through the post are essential for sharing the newer products – like his sugo. As Bippi grows from a pantry staple into a broader Italian Australian food brand, reaching customers wherever they are remains just as important to Circosta as creating products inspired by his family’s traditions.
“I wanted it to taste exactly how my nonna’s would taste,” Circosta says. “When Nonna cooks her sauce, it’s simmering away for hours and it’s got all these beautiful aromas. To replicate that was very challenging. It took us about 15, 16 months to get the right ingredients and the right tomatoes, but we got it. And every time I eat it, it literally reminds me of my nonna.”
Circosta is excited to keep growing and bringing the tastes he grew up with to an audience that might not be lucky enough to have a nonna making it all for them.
“The world’s evolving, people don’t have that time anymore, so we wanted to create something that gives you that level of quality,” Circosta says. “It’s exciting where our brand’s going – becoming more of an Italian Australian brand, and not just the chilli brand.”
This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Australia Post.
Produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Australia Post.
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Dining and Cooking