Who are Natoora?

Are they just another part of a supermarket chain or a fake farm name appearing as part of a brand diversity?

You will have doubtless seen their name on the Ocado website or perhaps seen their beautiful vans cruising by…but who are they?

We get talking to Franco Fubini, the founder, and CEO of Natoora.
As I start talking to Franco, he is very relaxed and friendly. I can tell he loves telling me about Natoora so we start talking about the business and what better place to start than at the beginning, the origin of Natoora, and how it all started.

The business started 15 years ago through a simple desire to connect consumers with a better quality product that wasn’t widely available. At that time there was no way to get the best food and ingredients that the best restaurants used and for the home cook who wanted to cook with the best seasonal produce, the products just didn’t exist.

Franco left his background in finance and with no background in the food industry, just a love of good cooking, he started the first stage of his journey. The first job in the food industry was working for Phil Britten, a well-known Michelin-starred British chef.He worked at his fruit and vegetable wholesale business, Solstice. Phil had already started a home delivery service alongside his wholesale business. It was a modest side-line business, taking only a handful of orders per month. A home customer would call in, ask for a few different items and Phil would get the order delivered...simple.

“I saw what he was doing and I was interested, and I thought how amazing the link would be between a guy who supplied 2 and 3 star Michelin restaurants and the home cook, so I thought why not try and get this product and take it to a wider audience.”

Franco went into Solstice to help set up their home delivery service and eventually took it to the next level. After a while, he was involved in the wholesale side of things. He stayed at Solstice for around 18 months and then was ready to move on.

A French company called Natoora wanted to join forces with Solstice and partner them with this new E-commerce style food business that they had set up. Natoora was only a small company with two staff at that time. Franco had already decided to leave Solstice, saw a new challenge, and took over at Natoora instead. He joined the existing business as MD, they stripped it out of Natoora France, the Mother company, and started afresh. Since then Natoora has flourished. They currently trade in 5 cities: London, Milan, Paris, NYC, and L.A., and have 350 staff members across all regions.

The current business is big and growing fast. Natoora is one of the few companies to supply restaurants and retail, and also direct to the public, although now due to the restrictions of Covid, other fruit and vegetable wholesalers have begun to supply direct to the public. Ocado is a big customer and Natoora has been working closely with them for 9 years now. Their supply chain now reaches over 700 of London's most influential kitchens. Pre-Covid, the single biggest part of the business were restaurant clients.

“There are a lot of synergies in being present in more than one channel.”

“ Human relationship is the heart of how we work with farmers.”

Natoora has helped to set up farms in Cornwall and Sicily, the key to their success and motivation is better understanding the realities that their farms need to survive daily.

“We do things very naturally, the way we work with farmers, we are very interested in understanding their business and that feeds into the way we act and behave. More often than not we take decisions for the benefit of the farmer rather than the benefit of Natoora.”

It is very refreshing to hear that this kind of relationship happens rather than the all too common story of big suppliers demanding more, paying less, and turning the screws on smaller producers.

“We try and bend our supply chain to fit their needs, not always the case and not always possible but we are much more mindful of the farmers and their business than perhaps other suppliers or buyers are, which gets returned in kind from the farmers.”

The reciprocity of the relationship creates a level of ‘buy in’ from the farmers and also the farmers understand and appreciate what Natoora are trying to achieve as a business; revolutionising the food system and achieving a great change in society. “Natoora gets a lot of alignment with their farmers and in their supply chain, because of this shared ideal, and they fully believe that we are doing something amazing. In return we enable the farmers to gain access to markets that they would not normally be able to get access to. The Farmers ‘buy in’ boils down to the belief that: “Natoora is valuing my product, creating demand for my product, which is farmed in perhaps a more costly way than my competitors, but they think it's worth it”. When the farmer works with Natoora, the relationship is hardly ever an exclusive one… although Franco is happy to admit they do get looked after by the farmers too! More often than not, Natoora end up with better products, the farmers get looked after by Natoora’s nurturing style and the farmers are excited by the projects that are proposed by Natoora. It seems like a very happy synergy and for all the right reasons. It makes perfect sense: when you respect and appreciate what a farmer does, he will be likely to accept and relish the proposals you put forward.

“We can create a unique relationship for the farmer, working with us is a far more unique experience than if they sell to someone else.”

Do farming methods have influence on the product selection of a supplier like Natoora? For instance, if a farmer is growing great veg, but his process might not be good for the land, how much do his methods affect Natoora?

“It's having more and more influence as time goes by, it much more important to us now than it was two years ago or more. We try to be pragmatic with the farmers, we cherish a long-term relationship. We try to avoid having to go to a farmer and say look unless you change these processes we don’t like, then we won’t be buying from you, we are starting to think how can we have those conversations, having your own farms helps you know how to have these difficult conversations.”

By being so involved in the farming themselves Natoora has made itself more informed than another buyer would otherwise be. They care a lot about the method, not everyone that Natoora buys from can follow this idealistic method of farming that Natoora would prefer. When they find someone who is producing great veg, they try not to discard it because of one or two practices they don’t like. Natoora takes a long view, a nurturing approach.

“Does the farmer have the right approach, is their head in the right place?”

“Perhaps by circumstance, they are farming using practices that are a bit too intense, or using some pesticides or chemicals we disagree with. Ultimately if we really like the family and the product is amazing and we understand why they are doing what they are doing, if it’s a kind of last resort, then we take a holistic view and say hey maybe we can help them develop a bit more and improve. It's this part that we need to work on more, how do we engage with farms and help them move in a more sustainable direction?”

Natoora goes to extraordinary lengths to discover new farms and products, they have always invested a lot of time and money in investigating who they buy from. They invest in traveling to farms, they over invest compared to anyone else in the market place and by a long way. Natoora created a buying hub in Milan in 2007 “We have 5 people in Milan, they visit people regularly throughout the year. The Team in Milan sees farms all over Europe. They spend a lot of time on the ground, in fact, it was 170 days visiting farms in 2019.”

Natoora works with their farmers to help them bring their produce to market.
They take on both the role of enabler and buyer, allowing exclusive supply to be an option, but it's certainly not something they insist on, in fact, bespoke growing solely for them is a far smaller percentage of their purchases.

“From the farmer's point of view, there is more market for un-exclusive sales and Natoora helps them to realise these sales.“

The team advise the farmers, some farmers are much more geared up to start their own lines, usually based upon the advice from Natoora, and for some other farms, Natoora has to be more involved either on the ground or in purely financing, helping the farms identify where their investment might best assist their productivity.

Crop diversity is an aspect of biodiversity important for global food security. The loss of biodiversity is considered one of today’s most serious environmental concerns. I wanted to ask Franco his thoughts on disappearing crops and the narrowing of diversity in our diets.

“From our vantage point quality and diversity are improving”

“The things that are disappearing are the older French or Italian farmers in their 60’s or 70’s who farm in their back yards and maintain the heritage varieties and hold the seeds, as those farmers either stop farming or die, that's where you see the greatest loss in diversity, so these varieties and crops disappear.”

The Products that we see in general circulation watermelon radish and puntarella for example are being maintained through consumption at the restaurant and consumer level and by seed companies. Supermarkets are ultimately reducing diversity, but there are signs that the narrowing of diversity is reversing and buyers like Natoora are playing a part in that, influencing supermarkets to take weirder varieties. ”Weird for a supermarket anyway!”

But is farming a dying art, is the farming industry in decline? Or are there new farmers coming in and with that a renewed energy and imagination? Franco tells me that U.S. farming is growing, lots of new and young people moving into farming, there have always been a large number of farmers in the U.S. and that trend is continuing, particularly in the organic and well-farmed movement.

In Europe, up until only a year or two ago he would have said no, however that trend is shifting. “Children of farmers over the last 100 years have been leaving farms and moving into cities and seeing farming as dull, that is reversing more and more. In Italy and Europe, the farmers we were seeing were usually much older but now the people they are buying from are becoming younger. The new energy is coming back into farming. It’s an exciting time” For any company supplying mass retail, there is always the question of plastic and packaging. With such a refreshing and innovative attitude to their work, what do Natoora do about plastic and packing? “Plastic… It’s a big challenge. We have done a lot though, we took out over 2 million plastic punnets out of Ocado last year. We are well on our way to cutting out all plastic bag usage although we will need a few more months to get that put in place.”

In 2019 they decided to go plastic-free in everything outbound, they are probably around 60 percent there, and once the plastic bags go they will be very close to achieving their goal. The other remaining challenge they are working on is the plastic pots from their range of prepared foods. “Removing plastic is a bigger challenge to tackle in the U.S. In Europe there are lots of suppliers providing good plastic-free solutions, in the US it’s not the case….that’s what’s making it far easier to tackle plastic use in Europe. There is still a need for the bags that we use to retain humidity, they are key for keeping salads and vegetables fresh and are super important for shelf life. The Supermarkets have a lot to do, particularly in the UK, every single item of fruit and veg is wrapped in plastic, it's ridiculous!” By removing plastic, there must be additional cost implications that could put at risk the business, undoing all of the great things that they do with farmers and sustainability. Before pushing ahead with the switch to going plastic-free Franco and his team did a lot of research to ensure that they could absorb any extra costs, or even pass on any savings. They were the first to release into the market a plastic-free, 100% home compostable, flow-wrapped vegetable to the mass market. The way they were able to achieve that was they kept the retail price the same and maintained the packaging cost. They needed to adjust some of their practices: altering the ways they printed their punnets, larger batch sizes, and bigger volumes. The flow wrap system increased their productivity and reduced labour, previously some of these items were being wrapped by hand.

”All in all we were able to execute this whilst keeping the price competitive.”

“Retailers should be instigating the move away from plastic. It's down to the supplier to do it. If they were to say to us we will do this for you if you convert to plastic-free, provide some level of incentive, even if it was a one-off incentive, that would be far more productive.”

If the supermarkets dealt with Natoora in a similar way that Natoora deals with farmers, then the whole issue would make progress. “The next stage is getting rid of ALL in-bound plastic.” For Franco, this means dealing with the issue in the farms and removing all single-use plastic and plastic punnets. This will be the most challenging task so far.

There are a range of products that are sourced by Natoora and are classified by them as ‘Basics’, these products are farmed more intensively: They accept and understand that these items are not farmed in a way that would usually be acceptable. “We make that compromise because slowly but surely we are improving the supply of those items”. Aubergines are now grown on their farm in Sicily, parsley, and milk are both improved lines, and they are continuing to improve those remaining products. But these products, whilst not perfect are still part of the ethos, continually improving, growing, and taking the farmer along with them. The worry of using more intensively farmed items is primarily pesticides, harsher chemicals, and fewer controls of production. Natoora avoids chemicals and herbicides like glyphosate. No question. As with all of their processes, they usually look at the farmer and check and see what the reason is for using any pesticides. “If the use is ingrained, historical use, then we stay away if there’s a reason if it’s as a last resort and they can justify it then we are happy with that." Natoora is moving fast and will continue to push ahead of their competitors, they will continue to find new farms like Melilot, their farm in Cornwall, run by Dan Cox, and expand into other regions and continue to build supply chains. It’s what they are set up to do and they do it so well. They are very keen to continue growing and building their outlets either via restaurants or their stores to continue their growth and their reach. They are very keen to continue their growth and increase their reach by supplying more restaurants and increasing the number of their stores

Franco is very excited for what he calls "Prepared foods", it fuels their counter concept in the store in Notting Hill, a selection of juices, humous’ and dips, sauces, granola, fruit, and nut bars. “You’ll be able to get a salad, a soup, charred vegetables with some grains: the products are sold ready to go, pestos, chili sauces, some fermented items. We believe we can do it like no one else can, high quality, 100 percent traceable, and 100 percent seasonal.”

“No one is really doing that combination”

I found my chat with Franco very positive and so refreshing. It does give me a huge amount of optimism. Natoora is a multi-facetted, unique, and inspiring company, and their desire to improve all that they are involved in is infectious. Since our chat, I have revisited their presence on Ocado which I had almost dismissed by a lack of knowledge. I am so glad I have. Their produce is amazing and their ideals and executions are too.

Special thanks to @matt_russell, @kittycoles @jenkayprops @natoora @poppyroyds, and of course @franconatoora

FOOD

Franco Fubini, CEO of Natoora discusses Farms, Sustainability and going Plastic-Free. PHOTOS_Matt Russell, STYLE_Kitty Coles, WORDS_Iain Graham