It started with a peach

Living in NYC as an adult, Franco started cooking, working his way through Jacques Pépin’s La Technique to learn and relearn the classics. This meant spending a lot of time seeking out produce. Citarella, Union Square, Balducci’s and Grace’s Marketplace were his locals, but supermarket shelves revealed a distorted new reality.

Fruits and vegetables were available all year round. In pulling away from the seasons, we had made flavour almost impossible to find. We were asking for peaches in December.

London, 2004. Franco connected his entrepreneurship with food, joining forces with Solstice to launch their home delivery service. In November 2005, he moved over to Natoora — a French company specialising in sourcing fresh ingredients for home delivery — to launch their UK outpost. This was the very start of our food system revolution.

Natoora came to life in local markets; vital windows into regional food systems and an opportunity to meet the people upholding them. It’s here — at the Milan, Barcelona, and Fondi markets — that Franco found culturally rich products that stay local, usually as a result of fragmented distribution systems and the unwillingness of wholesalers or specialists to invest in deep, local sourcing. They became our root systems, capable of reaching deep into regions and broadening their value.

It was the direct relationships forged at and through these markets that became springboards for radical change. At the Milan market, Franco tasted a White Peach with flesh almost entirely blushed with deep purple streaks. Two years of hunting around the Italian countryside to trace that peach back to its grower led him to Domenico, whose stone fruits have become an institution for us in Europe over the warmer months.

Small-scale growers like Domenico have become our lifeblood. Anyone can pursue new flavour peaks, but only exceptional growers with incredible instincts and fierce resolution can come close to achieving them.

With a growing understanding of the impact of our food choices (and the value of making better ones), it was time to take the flavour-first produce to home cooks — the next step in shifting the habits that underpin our food system.

First, we looked at supermarket shelves, where intensively farmed, year-round produce dominated. By working with, not against them, we realised that we could have the biggest impact on the day-to-day spending habits of consumers.

In 2012 we started working with Ocado, then Waitrose, Selfridges, Wholefoods and Eataly in the UK and Monoprix in Paris. In 2013 we opened the first of our four West London stores.

Then, in March 2020 as the pandemic led to local lockdowns at a global scale and restaurants were forced to close, we continued to back our growers by pivoting to home deliveries in London and New York. In the first week, we delivered to over 2000 London homes.