About: Our Story & Leadership | Ladle & Leaf Co-Manufacturing

Legacy & Story

Twenty-five years of feeding people, every day.

Ladle & Leaf began in 1999 as the San Francisco Soup Company, opening its first location in the Crocker Galleria in San Francisco's financial district.

The idea was simple: make soup the centerpiece of a fast, convenient lunch rather than an afterthought, and use quality ingredients to make each soup memorable. We started with an opening repertoire of roughly 25 recipes spanning vegetarian, meat, spicy, and sweet. From the beginning, we considered the broad range of guest needs and labeled our soups Vegetarian, Low-Fat, Dairy-Free, and Spicy. Later, we added Gluten-Free. The first restaurant was an immediate success and quickly grew into a Bay Area institution.

As the menu expanded to salads, grain bowls, and prepared foods, we rebranded to Ladle & Leaf to reflect how we evolved. Through it all, it has stayed a locally owned, family-run business.

Friends sharing several soups together, spoons meeting over the bowls

Trusted Retail Experience

A working portfolio of restaurants, not just a factory.

We don't just manufacture soup; we sell it to real guests every single day across our portfolio of Bay Area fast-casual restaurants.

That operating footprint is our test kitchen at scale. Recipes are refined in live service, proven against real customer demand, and held to the standards of a brand that puts its own name on the bowl. When you launch a product from our catalog, you're launching something that has already earned its place on a menu, not a formulation that has only ever existed in a lab.

✓Battle-tested recipes refined daily in real restaurant service
✓Operator's mindset: we understand cost, consistency, and throughput firsthand
✓Real palate intelligence: a quarter century of guest feedback tells us which flavor profiles land, what gets reordered, and what gets sent back, knowledge no lab focus group can match

Ladle & Leaf restaurant counter with menu boards

Leadership

Culinary craft, run like an operation

Our leadership pairs entrepreneurial brand-building with disciplined operations, so creative recipes translate cleanly into safe, repeatable, scalable production.

Steve Sarver

Founder, Chief Executive Officer LinkedIn ↗

Steve founded the San Francisco Soup Company in 1999, turning a simple conviction, that great soup could anchor a fast, healthy lunch, into a Bay Area restaurant brand. He grew the business to more than a dozen locations and led its evolution into Ladle & Leaf.

Before founding the company, Steve was a marketing manager at The Clorox Company. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania and his MBA at Harvard Business School, a blend of consumer-brand discipline and entrepreneurial drive that still shapes how the company builds products for its wholesale partners.

Clayton Chan

Chief Operating Officer LinkedIn ↗

Clayton leads operations across the business and was a driving force behind the rebrand from San Francisco Soup Company to Ladle & Leaf, as the menu evolved beyond soup into a balanced offering of soups, salads, grain bowls, and sandwiches. His focus on quality and consistency is what allows recipes to scale without losing their character.

A San Francisco native, Clayton earned his undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley and his MBA at Harvard Business School. He has also championed the company's community work, including a long-running partnership with The Bread Project that funds culinary job training for chronically unemployed adults in the Bay Area.

Let's build something

Bring us a recipe, a concept, or a challenge.

Tell us about your product and volume. Our culinary and operations teams will map the fastest, lowest-risk path to a shelf-ready product.