How Dipitt got onto shelves in 33 countries

A brand Muzamil had quietly been using for years

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation as part of the running Endeavor Pakistan series — fifty of the most interesting startups and businesses in the country — and admitting something more personal. He had wanted to meet the man behind Dipitt for four or five years. He had used the product. He knew the brand. He did not know the founder until Endeavor’s team connected them.

The number that comes up off-camera, and that he repeats on the record, is the one he could not stop thinking about: Dipitt is exporting to thirty-three countries. By the brand’s own data they are the number one sauce company in Pakistan, and within the broader condiments universe — where National Foods and Kunhar dominate — they are already in the top five and, in Muzamil’s reading, likely to be top three soon. The guest sitting across from him is Syed Zeeshan Haider, founder and CEO. The conversation that follows is the story of how a chemical-free side project in a Karachi kitchen became a national brand on shelves from Skardu to Quetta, and from there into Tesco, Asda and B&M in the UK.

NED, Unilever, LUMS, and a boss who said “go”

Zeeshan was born and raised in Karachi. School at Adamjee, engineering at NED — a school he describes with a half-smile as one that “teaches you street smartness, and an engineer too, as much as you can become one.” From there he joined Siemens, then Unilever. It was at Unilever, surrounded by business graduates with what he calls finesse he felt he lacked, that the idea of an MBA crystallised.

His Unilever boss pushed him hard. He filled out the LUMS form, sat the test, applied for financial aid because the fees were beyond what his family could absorb, and got it. “Now I had to go,” he says. “There was no reason to turn it down then.” He was twenty-four. Many of his LUMS batchmates were in their forties and fifties. The two years at LUMS, he says, were what refined him — not just academically, but the dorm-life relationships that, in his words, “become khaandani dosti, family-level friendships.”

After LUMS came K-Electric, then Philip Morris, where he was pulled in for the acquisition of Lakson Tobacco — the company behind the Morven Gold ad with the running horse that he remembers from childhood. Philip Morris moved him to Hong Kong, then the Philippines. He stayed abroad for years. “Bhai ki jo company hoti hai,” he says of Philip Morris, “woh logon mein bara invest karti hai.” They invested heavily in him. By his last role he was running three of their cigarette brands — Marlboro, Red & White and K2.

The shirt his daughter spilled on

Two things pulled him home, and then out of the corporate track entirely. His mother was unwell and he wanted to be with her — he had already turned down a Vietnam posting and a Lausanne one, and the cumulative no was starting to feel ethically off to him. The second reason was smaller and stranger. His daughter had been born. He worked in product development on cigarettes; he was around the product constantly. “I think there was one incident when she spilled my shirt and she didn’t like it. I think that was kind of a tipping point for me. I said I don’t want to do tobacco.”

He resigned. The night he handed in the letter, he slept. His wife did not. The company gave him a week to reconsider. He took the week and came back with the same answer. He had no concrete plan. What he had was three or four years of dollar-denominated savings from his overseas postings, and a willingness to spend a chunk of it on whatever came next.

Karachi Eat, wings, and the sauces that customers kept asking to buy

There was no master plan for sauces. The opening was Karachi Eat. The event was in its first or second year, in Frere Hall, and Zeeshan took a stall. His wife had been making barbecue and buffalo wing sauces in the Philippines for friends coming over. The wings became the product. They sold out, every day.

That success funded a small restaurant in Bukhari, then SAR, then Tipu Sultan, then Askari. The sauces were on the table, used in the wings, and increasingly being asked for on their own. “Bahut baar log aate the, bolte the wings na de, sirf sauce de de,” he tells Muzamil. That was the signal.

The original Dipstick research, as he calls it, was not an agency study. It was walking into retailers and asking them how many cartons of imported sauce they were bringing in per month, how many pallets per quarter, and then doing the maths on what total demand looked like nationally. He cross-checked his gut against those numbers. The rest — flavours, packaging, who to call first — was instinct.

Muzamil presses him on the obvious question: why kill the restaurants and double down on bottled sauce? Zeeshan still wishes he hadn’t. “Mein jissay milta hoon bolta hai, aap ne ek galat kaam kiya zindagi mein, aap ne Wingit band kar diya,” he says. He had a team of three. Twenty-four hours in a day. He had to choose one. He chose the bottle. He still wants to bring back frozen wings with proper flavours one day. He is the first to admit Wingit was ahead of its time — 2016 Pakistan did not yet know wings the way 2026 Pakistan does.

How a Karachi sauce got into Springs, Naheed and Al Fatah

The distribution story is, in Zeeshan’s telling, almost embarrassingly relational. A friend named Junaid had opened a store called Springs in Karachi. Zeeshan asked him to put a few bottles on the shelf. The deal he offered was simple: if it does not sell by Monday, I will take it back. It sold out. Barbecue Tonight was next — they agreed to put Dipitt ketchup bottles on every restaurant table, which doubled as free marketing. Then Naheed, then Al Fatah, then Jalal Sons.

For Lahore, where he didn’t know anyone, he called a LUMS dorm-mate from his Unilever-Philippines batch and asked him to become the distributor. The man had no distribution experience, but he had spent a career in sales. From Karachi, Dipitt’s stock travelled by train to Lahore, then to Faisalabad, then by Shahzore truck, then in full containers. The footprint grew the way the people around him grew.

When Muzamil presses on the cold calls, Zeeshan is honest. There were some. There was at least one very large retail chain — he won’t name them on camera — where he simply waited until they took the meeting. The pitch never changed. “Aap meri baat chhoren,” he would tell them. “Mein jo bhi keh raha hoon woh bakwaas hai, aap mera bas product try kar lein.” His own number, the one he keeps coming back to, is that 95% of the time, once the retailer tasted the sauce, they agreed to stock it. The other 5% asked him to come back in a fortnight.

Today, Dipitt is number one in sauces in Pakistan and top three or four across the broader condiments category. They sell roughly sixty-seven flavours, with around fifty in the Pakistani lineup. They cover thirty to forty towns directly, from Skardu in the north to Quetta in the south, with sub-distributors and wholesalers reaching the rest.

What KFC and McDonald’s actually bought

Muzamil’s first guess about the QSR partnerships is the obvious one — Dipitt ketchup on a McDonald’s table, the way Kunhar’s chilli garlic became inseparable from KFC’s brand memory for a whole generation. Zeeshan corrects him. The real business with KFC and McDonald’s is not the table bottle. It is innovation as a service.

Around 2018-2019, when Pakistan’s dollar crunch made it impossible to import speciality sauces on a normal schedule, KFC and McDonald’s had a problem. Their existing global suppliers needed six months to develop a new sauce, by which point the flavour trend had moved on. Dipitt’s pitch was speed. “Hamen koi chahiye jo jump up kar ke jaldi yeh kaam kar de,” Zeeshan recalls them telling him. Dipitt could turn around a new sauce in a fraction of the time, and they used the work itself as a learning loop — engaging with KFC’s global and regional teams, with McDonald’s, Subway, Papa John’s. “Yeh interaction pehle nahi hoti thi with the local manufacturers,” he says. Most local players were not in the room. Dipitt walked in.

The dollarised ingredient

Muzamil pushes hard on the price-point question. Pakistan is an agrarian economy. Thirty-five percent of GDP is agriculture. Surely a locally produced sauce should be structurally cheaper than an imported one travelling through Japan, Thailand, Dubai and into Karachi.

Zeeshan’s answer is more sobering than the question expects. “Mayonnaise ke liye oil Pakistan mein aaj ke din tak sab bahir se hi lete hain,” he says. The soya seed is imported from America; only the crushing is local. The plastic bottle on the shelf is made in Pakistan, but the dana — the resin — is imported. “Aap bolen haan mein locally le raha hoon, lekin woh local toh nahi hai, woh toh imported hai.” His point is that backend-traced, almost everything in a Pakistani-made sauce is dollar-packed.

The competitive edge then is not cost — it is two other things. The first is duty arbitrage when the playing field is level. The second, which is where he sounds genuinely proud, is the vertical-integration work Dipitt has done in the last two years. They have started working with progressive farmers in the Kunri-Umarkot belt — Asia’s largest red chilli growing region, next to Rajasthan — to grow cayenne, Tabasco and jalapeño peppers locally. It is still prototype scale. But the direction is set: stop importing the chilli, grow it here.

How COVID handed Dipitt the world

The export story has a structure most people would not predict. They started with consumer first, not B2B. They got onto shelves in retail before they got into kitchens. And then COVID happened.

“COVID really helped us. It’s a controversial statement, but COVID really helped us,” Zeeshan says. The Western producers of speciality sauces — almost all of them Europe- or North America-based — saw their own factories cut production from thirty days a month to fifteen. Whatever they made, they prioritised for their domestic shelves. Exports stopped. Shelves in the GCC, Asia, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia started emptying out. Buyers in those markets started looking for anyone with quality and speed.

A LUMS alum who had become a head of buying at a large retailer reached out. They asked for a mixed container. Dipitt produced through COVID and shipped in fifteen days. A month later the same buyer placed an order for ten containers. Zeeshan remembers the two reactions in sequence: “Yeh toh das banayenge kaise — yeh pehle toh sawal aa gaya — phir iske paise nahi the.” Japan, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon all came through that window.

Today Dipitt is sold in thirty-three countries. In the UK, that means Tesco, Asda, Farm Fresh and B&M. The hardest market to crack, Zeeshan tells Muzamil, was not Germany. It was Japan. “The most strict market in terms of food certification is Japan,” he says. “Even more than the Germans.” Clearing Japan made everything else easier. His own claim is that Dipitt is now one of the most heavily certified food companies in Pakistan, and he credits the QSR partnerships for the discipline that built the certification function.

Bringing in three former bosses to keep him honest

Later in the discussion, Muzamil shifts to the institutional question — how do you take a founder-run company and corporatise it without losing its edge. Zeeshan’s answer is the most quietly counter-cultural thing he says in the conversation.

During COVID, he realised something about himself. “Yeh jo mein decision making kar raha hoon, may be is mein se shayad kuch sahi ho, kuch hindsight mein shayad sahi na ho. Insaan se ghalti ho jaati hai,” he says. “Meri accountability kisi ko bhi nahi thi. Mein kisi ko bhi jawab deh nahi tha.” He decided to fix that by forming a board. He could not afford to pay board remuneration. So he called three of his former bosses. They agreed. Since 2022 they have been the company’s guiding force — one of them, a former Unilever marketing head, is the first call he makes on any brand decision. Another is hardcore sales. The point of the structure, in his words, is twofold: real accountability, and a support system of three numbers he can dial when stuck.

He concedes the awkwardness. “Aap owner of the business toh hain, but aap ki cheezen bhi koi aur dictate kar raha hai.” He thinks more founders should do this anyway.

Where Pakistan’s real export opportunity actually lives

Muzamil’s longest argument in the episode is that Pakistan is sleeping on agri-processing. He gives the example his brother had recently raised with him — the country exports raw, unprocessed agricultural goods at low value and then imports the finished products back. Zeeshan agrees and frames the problem differently. “Aap ke jo manufacturers hain, they want easy win, no value addition, and no investing in R&D,” he says. The shortcut is to grind pink salt and ship it to Dubai for someone else to turn into a lamp. The harder, more lucrative path is to do the value-add in Pakistan. Almost nobody does.

His own example is mango. A Polish distributor told him Pakistani mangoes are exceptional, but when the distributor had approached the country’s largest mango exporter to ask about a paste or syrup product, he had been told to go home — nothing could be done. Zeeshan’s read is that this is exactly the kind of problem Dipitt could solve. A Chausa syrup or paste, exportable, shelf-stable, opens up mango lassi and mango shake demand across the world. He wants to do that work.

When Muzamil pushes him on why he doesn’t expand horizontally into wings, frozen foods, the obvious adjacent SKUs, Zeeshan’s answer is the one a more mature operator gives. “Ek hamari expertise hai, aur ek insaan har cheez nahi kar sakta.” He would rather help someone else build it. He mentions a chocolatier who came to him recently and asked for advice; Zeeshan asked him to come on a Saturday and run trials on Dipitt’s machinery. He has done the same with a cookie brand called Karamel — a partnership rather than an in-house extension. “Agar koi banda aur bhi achha kaam kar raha hai, toh zaroori hai har cheez maine hi karni hai?”

The snake who told him to give up

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks about the moments where someone tried to talk him out of the business. Zeeshan tells one. Early on, a contact sent him to meet a well-regarded sauce maker who was already doing well. Zeeshan describes him directly: “Ek saanp ne ek saanp ke paas bheja.” The meeting demoralised him for two or three days. He decided he was not going to do Dipitt at all. Then he turned it around. “Ab toh maine itna kaam kar liya, agar ab nahi karoonga toh pagal hoonga. Let’s just do it.”

The man who tried to demoralise him later copied the product. “It’s good. They learned something from us.” His advice to anyone listening is delivered without any drama. “Itna demotivate nahi hona chahiye, utne serious bhi nahi hona chahiye. Kabhi log zyada hi dil par le aate hain.” Sometimes you launch a product and it doesn’t work. So what.

Muzamil closes the conversation at the ninety-minute mark and tells Zeeshan, plainly, that this is one of his favourite episodes of the series. Zeeshan’s closing thought is in the same register as everything that came before it. “Aisa nahi hai ke sab kuch Pakistan mein ghalat hua. Kuch sahi bhi hua hoga, das percent hi sahi hua hoga, par sahi hua hai.” Then his example — TCF schools that did not exist when he was a child, and now graduate fifty thousand students a year. A LUMS National Outreach Programme student from a town past Chaman. A Pakistani student from Gilgit-Baltistan who went through LUMS and is now at Harvard. The pace, he admits, is slower than it should be. But the direction is forward. That, he tells Muzamil, is enough to keep building on.