A conversation with Franco Fubini, co-founder of Natoora and author of In Search of the Perfect Peach, about flavour as the key to unlocking consumer demand. We talked about what leads to great flavour, which is of course soil health, but first, we need amazing seeds. How do we make sure farmers get paid fairly when they grow the most amazing pumpkins or peaches? Creating demand for flavour is crucial, and much of it starts with the world’s leading restaurants and chefs, who are relentlessly searching for the best flavours to feature on their plates.
LISTEN TO THE CONVERSATION ON:
Most of the food today in the global north flows through supply chains and ends up in supermarkets. So how do we build enough demand and strong supply connections between the farmers who are purely focused on flavour and the ones that supply supermarkets, maybe first online but then also retail? It took Franco 20 years, but now his company Natoora is starting to crack that code, supplying over 2,000 of the world’s top restaurants and some leading supermarkets with a focus on radical seasonality. After all, we don’t have just four seasons but 365.
Finally, food miles are overrated and won’t change the food system, plus super diverse farms won’t lead to the best flavour; we need specialisation and scale.
WHY CONSUMER DEMAND SHIFT IS SO CRUCIAL
Consumer demand is fundamental in influencing supermarket procurement decisions.
”If we can shift consumer demand, the production capability right, the land, the varieties, the farmers are there, and the product can be made accessible. We can farm it, and we can put it in front of the consumer, so it is purely a matter of believing that the shift can happen.” Franco Fubini
”If we can shift consumer demand, then that will change what those supermarket buyers are buying. Having said that, the question you asked about, how do we get them excited? If we can get them excited, and sometimes we have been successful, that does accelerate the transformation, because, as you rightly say, a consumer might want a really good unwaxed lemon at their store, but they’re going to email Whole Foods and say, Hey, I shop at The Williamsburg store, I would really like to have unwaxed lemons, like no, but if those unwaxed lemons make it to the store, there might be hundreds of customers that start buying them, and other customers that weren’t aware might also start trying them.” Franco Fubini
RADICAL SEASONALITY, AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT
Franco introduces the concept of radical seasonality, emphasising the importance of understanding varietal differences and micro-seasonality. He explains how radical seasonality allows for more nuanced flavour combinations and better cooking practices.
”I like to look at seasonality through this again. I touch on this in the book through this lens of, as I say, a 365-day continuum; seasonality is always evolving. It’s always changing as each day goes by. So when we look at radical seasonality when we first came up with the concept of radical seasonality, it was really to give customers, and also that includes chefs, this idea that you need to run a much finer comb through seasonality than just utilising the four seasons that we are very comfortable with because that added detail that you get by looking at seasonality on a day to day or on a week to week basis, educates you, gets you to look at product at a varietal level. So, to say that peaches are a summer product is correct, but it would be the same as saying that you drive a car or that you drive a convertible in the summer. What is a lot more interesting, and that feeds into seasonality as well, is that you have a Reine Claude plum that is available for four weeks of the year in the late summer, and that comes from southern France, and that is a very specific, unique variety of plum. That’s the equivalent of saying that you’re driving a Mazda Miata or something equivalent. So, you’re starting to get into the specific of the varietal, and when you get into the specific of the varietal, you get into the specific week window where that product is in season.” Franco Fubini
”So that’s what you get with this idea of radical seasonality. It’s about being much more granular, much deeper in the analysis of the product as it moves through the season. And what that does for the consumer is it gives them the tools to cook better, because you can start gaining deeper knowledge into when something is in season and how best to use it because you’re paying closer attention to the individual ingredient, and you’re also paying close attention to what is within that window.” Franco Fubini
WHAT IS THE EARLY PEAK AND LATE PEAK IN FRUIT AND VEGGIES
He highlights the importance of early peak and late peak varieties to provide chefs with a wider range of flavours throughout the year.
”It’s become really central to the way that we communicate products because, as you say, it gives you further information that helps you become a better cook. It helps you to understand the product and helps you to understand that the product needs to be handled differently and has different use cases, in a way to borrow a business term, as it progresses through the season. I have to say that the early, peak, late was something that I borrowed from the Japanese; there’s a very good book. I don’t know if that’s the book that I read in Kaizeki—that it’s a Japanese cookbook that talks about the concept of EPL (early, peak, late). It’s a quite well- known concept in Japanese culture. Interestingly, in Japanese, which I find fascinating, sometimes a late orange might have a different name than a peak orange or an early orange. So as a product moves through the season and evolves, it will have a different name.” Franco Fubini
SPECIALISATION OF FARMERS AND APPROPRIATE SCALE IS KEY
Franco argues for the importance of specialisation in farming to achieve high-quality flavour. He explains the concept of accessible scale, where farms focus on a few high-quality products to deliver large quantities.
”In order to achieve really good flavour, you need to specialise, right? And that is something that I wholeheartedly believe in. Going back to the Japanese, the Japanese have demonstrated this: that perfecting an art requires specialisation, right? You do the same thing over and over again through your whole lifetime, your whole career. And the Japanese believe that even then, you haven’t reached perfection. If you grow melons. So, we have a fantastic melons farmer, Oscar, in Mantova. If you grow melons, like he does, melons, watermelons, and pumpkins, which are all parts of the same plant family, you can get really, really damn good at growing them. If you’re growing like some of the other farms, you work with two or 300 varieties of product; you have two challenges there. One is, you don’t specialise because it’s impossible to get really good at farming 300 things. The other thing is that your soil, your farming practices, and your microclimate are not suited to growing 300 types of vegetables incredibly well. So, there’s a specialisation piece that comes in to drive flavour.” Franco Fubini
”The other piece that I think is fundamental in the specialisation piece is what I call accessible scale. So, it’s a term that I came up with because I believe that scale is fundamental. If we are going to address my first point of the reality that we live in and the food system that we exist in, right? We need scale if we want to see significant change. In order to achieve scale, the farms need to be able to deliver scale. They need to be able to produce large quantities of product. So, in order to produce large quantities of product, you can do so when you specialise, if you take 200 acres and you grow only melons on them. So, to give you a sense, Oscar has about 400 plus acres in production, of which he farms on maybe 250 to 300 in any given year, because the rest is in rotation. He can farm large, large quantities of melons, watermelons, and pumpkins. The important thing about this is that if you are going to deliver impact, most of the food is consumed in supermarkets and will be consumed in supermarkets in the next 10 to 20 years. We will not go away with the supermarket model.” Franco Fubini
”So, we need quality farms to scale, and that’s where this accessible scale concept comes in, right? It’s scalable farming, but that is accessible. I’m not talking about a 1000-acre farm. I’m talking about 50 to 500 acres or 1000 acres, but that gets specialised, gets really good at farming, gets really good at soil management, and produces beautiful, quality food that is healthy for the planet. It’s healthy for our guts, and that is produced in enough quantity.” Franco Fubini
WINTER TOMATO IS SO SPECIAL
Franco mentions that one of his employees had a “flavour bomb” moment when they tried a winter tomato for the first time, saying it “marked them for life” and completely changed their perception of what a tomato could taste like.
”These are tomatoes that are grown in the wintertime, and it’s a farming innovation that’s relatively new because it’s of this century where you farm tomatoes in the wintertime. You do this in the wintertime because you want to do it at a time when you can stress the plant. In the summertime, you can’t stress a plant as much because you would kill it off very quickly because of the intense heat and the need for water. So, it’s a farming technique and a farming innovation, as I’d like to see it, that takes a new spin on farming a tomato outside of its normal or its natural growing season, which is the summer. The reason why it’s really dear to me is one: because I just find the flavour; every time I have an amazing winter tomato, it still blows my mind. I like the term you used, the flavour bomb. I never get tired of it. It’s totally different from a summer tomato. It’s almost like the contrast, right? The summer tomato is really sweet, kind of luscious, soft in a way; it sorts of melts in your mouth. The skin is soft. The winter tomato has a thick skin. It’s crunchy. The texture is really crunchy. It’s almost like eating an apple, and you have this saltiness that is balanced by the sweetness. So, it’s a really weird flavour experience for somebody who’s used to eating really good summer tomatoes the first time they have them because it tricks your mind, and that’s one of the really neat things about it. It just really shifts your perception of what is possible.” Franco Fubini
OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED
Koen and Franco also talked about:
- How amazing flavour can lead to more consumer demand starting with chefs to eventually supermarkets
- Why chefs are a great beachhead for food systems change
LINKS:
LINKED INTERVIEWS:
- Nicolas Enjalbert – Let’s disrupt the oligopoly seeds industry, currently bad for everyone, people, planet and flavour
- Dan Barber, great flavour, health benefits and healthy ecosystems can only come from healthy soils not a lab
- Sam Kass – Get people access to carrots before talking about nutrient density, former Obama’s chef and nutrition advisor turned investor says
- Fred Provenza – What should we learn from domesticated animals when it comes to food as medicine
- Nutrient Density in Food series
- Pietro Galgani on paying the true price for food and agriculture products and how to get there
——————————————
Feedback, comments, suggestions? Reach me via Twitter @KoenvanSeijen, in the comments below or through Get in Touch on this website.
Join the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food newsletter on www.eepurl.com/cxU33P
The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.