Sara Polon

A soup company run by a former comic, and it's not the punchline

Walk into a Whole Foods on the East Coast, reach into the refrigerated case, and there is a decent chance you are holding a bowl of soup built by someone who used to work the comedy clubs of New York. Sara Polon runs Soupergirl, the Washington, DC company she launched in 2008. Today its lentil, gazpacho and seasonal soups sit on more than 800 shelves - Whole Foods, Costco, Kroger, Safeway, Amazon Fresh - and the whole thing is plant-based, kosher, plastic-neutral, and built on a labor standard most grocery brands have never heard of.

Polon did not arrive at soup the way most food founders do. There was no culinary school, no line-cook apprenticeship, no family recipe handed down with a wink. There was a book. She read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, got angry about how food gets made in America, and decided to do something about it. The fact that she could barely cook was, by her mother's own assessment, a real problem.

So her mother joined the company. Marilyn Polon - a self-taught culinary master - looked at her daughter's kitchen skills, declared them mediocre at best, and stepped in to run the cooking. The two of them became Soupergirl and Soupermom. Inside the company, Marilyn carries the only-half-joking title of Chief Anxiety Officer. The mission they wrote down was not modest: a naively optimistic plan to save the world through healthy, delicious food.

From one badly air-conditioned restaurant kitchen to a 15,000-square-foot plant. The arc, in four numbers.

History major, tour guide, stand-up, soup CEO

Before the soup, Polon collected an unusual resume. She studied history at the University of Pennsylvania. She did a turn at an internet start-up. She led tours through the Middle East. Then in 2002 she moved to New York City to chase comedy, spending years on the stand-up circuit. None of it looks like a straight line toward a refrigerated grocery aisle - and that is exactly the point. The comedy timing did not disappear when she swapped the mic for a ladle; it shows up in how she talks about the business, the certifications, the fights worth picking.

Soupergirl started small and stayed scrappy for a while. The early days meant renting poorly climate-controlled kitchen space inside a local restaurant. In 2011 the mother-daughter team opened their first shop in Takoma, DC. A chef named Gonzalo came aboard in 2012, and the retail side began to grow. By 2015 Soupergirl walked into the Georgetown Whole Foods, and within a year it was selling across the Washington metro area. Then came Costco in 2016 - which Polon has described, plainly, as a serious game changer.

That line came in 2020, during one of the strangest stretches of her tenure. The US Chamber of Commerce invited her to submit a video question for a Fox News town hall with President Trump. Polon, anxious about reopening, asked what federal testing standards would be put in place so employees and customers could feel safe. The President answered a different question, talking through state-by-state approaches instead. Unsatisfied, she made her own call: she permanently closed the Dupont Circle location and leaned into delivery, which she judged safer for her team.

No deal, a Shark with regrets, and a phone call

In 2018, Soupergirl went on Shark Tank - Season 10 - asking for $500,000 in exchange for 10% of the company. The Sharks liked the soup. They did not like the margins, and they pushed hard on the refusal to use co-packers. Polon and her mother walked off without a deal. For most companies, that is the end of the story.

It wasn't. After the episode aired, guest Shark Matt Higgins had second thoughts. He reached out to say he regretted how it ended and wanted to change the ending - then became their advisor and mentor. The no-deal turned into a relationship, and the television exposure did the rest. What looked like a loss on camera became one of the more useful things that ever happened to the brand.

Two years later, the capital showed up in a way that fit the mission. In 2020 Soupergirl closed a $2 million Series A led by sustainability investment firm Arborview Capital, with Beyond Meat board member Seth Goldman involved. This was not generic growth money. It was money that agreed with the premise: that a company can be plant-based, fair to workers, and still earn a place in the Costco aisle.

First in line for a label nobody else had

In 2022, Soupergirl became the first brand to earn Fair Food Program certification - a labor standard rooted in protecting the farmworkers who grow the ingredients. It is the kind of credential that is invisible to most shoppers and enormous to the people it covers. For Polon, the certification is the whole argument made concrete: that fixing the food system means looking past the shelf, back through the supply chain, to the hands that pick the vegetables.

The sustainability side stacks up too. Soupergirl reached plastic-neutral status through a partnership with rePurpose Global, pairing it with clean-energy operations. The company's own shorthand for all of it - saving the planet one bowl of soup at a time - reads like a joke until you notice they keep actually doing the things.

That instinct - hand the mic to people who don't usually get it - led Polon to start a live storytelling series spotlighting women founders and operators, under the hashtag "our stories are better than yours." Her framing was pointed: don't come expecting tales of how hard it is to be a woman in the field. Come for stories of trailblazers focused on success, not struggle.

Bigger plant, more shelves, same premise

The growth kept compounding. By 2019 Soupergirl was shipping nationwide and serving as the exclusive soup provider for 70 Lidl stores in the Mid-Atlantic. In 2023 the operation moved into a larger 15,000-square-foot production facility. By 2024 the products were in more than 800 locations, and Polon was named an honoree in the Washington Business Journal's Women Who Mean Business awards. More recently the brand refreshed its look and pushed into a salsa line, widening the lane beyond the bowl.

What hasn't changed is the premise Polon started with: that a food company can refuse the easy shortcuts - the co-packers, the cheap plastic, the supply chains nobody asks about - and still grow. She is, in the end, a person who read one book, decided the system was broken, and built a profitable argument that it doesn't have to be. The comedian never fully left the room. She just found a bigger audience, and started feeding it.