Citizens of Soil: Sarah Fulton Vachon on turning a commodity into a community

0:15Hello and welcome to the Tomorrow Brands podcast where we explore what it takes to build a brand of tomorrow. I'm your host Ruth Vitock and today I'm joined by Sarah Fulton Vachon, co-founder at Citizens of Soil, the UK's most beautiful olive oil brand. We cover a lot of ground in this chat, from commodity supply chains and regenerative agriculture to physical brand activations, DTC challenges and building a business without compromising on values. Let's get into it. Hi Sarah, thanks so much for coming on today. Before we get started, it'd be great to hear your background and how you got to where you are now.

0:45Sarah Fulton Vachon:Ah, well Ruth, I'm so happy to have you here in our office as well. My background, so I have been a food and drink and career marketer, coming up through agencies, you know, PR brand, that side. And then I still was doing marketing, but moved into the world of sustainability. And that is really where this business started being entrenched with these surrounded by incredible sustainability consultants across carbon and from agriculture side and packaging side, and really learning a lot about particularly commodity supply chains, and getting switched on to solutions in agriculture, like regenerative practices.

1:21Sarah Fulton Vachon:And that really kind of set the foundation. And I was fortunate or unfortunate to have to start the business as a side hustle. And while I was doing that, I had all these incredible experts and I was just absorbing all the knowledge. And I think it really set the plan for, yes, I have a strong marketing foundation, but this business has to be a triple bottom line business of people, planet and profit. And how can I map that out? And that, yeah, was the start. And what drew you to olive oil specifically? Perfectly. I grew up in a family that, you know, my grandfather told me to exclusively use extra virgin olive oil.

1:56Sarah Fulton Vachon:And coming out of, I think, like the late 90s, when there was a lot of reports and seed oils were having, you know, refined oils were really coming up and doing a lot of propaganda. I remember telling my grandfather, no, but you can't fry. You can't cook with extra virgin olive oil. But, you know, living into his 90s, telling me as a farmer of someone who had a very plant-based diet saying, no, that was exclusively used extra virgin olive oil. I then went on to live in Spain and was surrounded and immersed in the Mediterranean diet. Always, I think, I'm certainly a spanophile of a person I love.

2:27Sarah Fulton Vachon:I'm obsessed with Spain. But then when I met my husband now, probably 14 years ago, he had kind of been, I say, recruited into a big Greek family and absorbed into this big Greek family. And so we started vacationing together. I would go with him then to these annual trips. And this family are small batch producers of wine. They do honey, but primarily wine and olive oil. And over the years, we just got to learn more and more about that production. And so as someone who already was really into the Mediterranean diet from a health and well-being perspective, but then sitting around a table with a big Greek family and getting outside of the culture and the background in Spain, it just felt like, God, this is delicious and this is amazing and I can't find it in the UK and I'm getting more and more obsessed.

3:09Sarah Fulton Vachon:We were bringing at one point litres and litre, you know, big containers we'd get from the mill after production back to the UK and putting it, decanting it in small bottles and giving it to our friends who were bartenders and chefs in the food space that we worked in and bringing it for family for Christmas and thinking, this is really an exciting, an exciting food. So tell us a bit about Citizens of Soil. What makes you different from the sort of standard commoditized olive oils that people are used to? The whole purpose of the business at the beginning was looking, as I said, I was working in sustainability and I was looking at these supply chains in olive oil and being like, this is what's happening.

3:47Sarah Fulton Vachon:This is what's happened in coffee and chocolate. And these were a product in the case of olive oil, how most of our olive oil gets to the table is that it is produced sometimes by small farmers, sometimes industrial groves, but then it's held in these mills and cooperatives and it might not be sold until the price is right. The farmer might not sell until the price is right. Then the mill is going to hold at the cooperative. Then everyone's going to kind of wait. Then they sell onto these middle people who then shift it to another country, another place, wait till the price is right, keep selling.

4:14Sarah Fulton Vachon:It gets lost in this commodity system. So by the time olive oil often finally gets bottled, and that's when they put the best before date, which is a whole other issue in the olive oil space, they put the best before date when it was finally bottled. By this point, it could have changed hands many times. It's probably blended to infinity with so many other sometimes older harvests. Certainly, you know, thousands of other producers might be in that blend. Moving country, getting bottled and then getting put on our shelf. and what was probably once in some element, maybe decent extra virgin olive oil, who's to say, because you don't know anymore, there's no proper track back to that, is now kind of this like bland, lifeless shadow of what it once was.

4:55Sarah Fulton Vachon:And that's what you can taste. And I feel like you can taste that in the stores. And also because of that model, they aren't showing full traceability. They're certainly not telling you a farmer name, but they aren't even necessarily zooming in on a region or a variety. You know, in olive oil, just like in wine, we have all these different cultivars that give different flavors and different profiles. But whenever you're doing these mega blends, that's not expressed. So you're not able to see. And then, like I said, with that best before date, that doesn't tell you when it was harvested. So you don't know how fresh it is.

5:22Sarah Fulton Vachon:And in a category that has made its reputation around being a superfood and having all these incredible health benefits, which a good olive oil does, if it's lacking a harvest date and you're lacking some of the necessary details of the quality, just because it's extra virgin doesn't mean it's fantastic quality. If you're lacking those details, you actually have no idea, besides if you're a properly trained taster, and most people don't really know what extra virgin olive oil should taste like, you don't know that quality and the flavor and the health benefits. So I felt like this whole lack of transparency and how the commodity system was run spoke to this opportunity of, let me just buy direct, also incentivize the farmers along the way, because back to my sustainability roots, I wanted farming practices that were beyond organic.

6:04Sarah Fulton Vachon:So of course, free from chemical and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. But I wanted these regenerative practices, which were building in soil health and preserving the Mediterranean Basin, which is heating at a higher rate than the rest of the global average. A lot of these traditional growers especially are sitting on big plots of land. And there's a real opportunity to have these biodiverse havens, like, you know, safe havens for nature, you know, other plants and animals, capturing carbon and helping a resiliency against an increasingly relentless climate that is changing from fires, floods, droughts, all these sorts of things.

6:41Sarah Fulton Vachon:And then can we get beyond that and see if we can actually make soils that are making healthier food, more nutrient-rich soils, is that going to help us produce more nutrient-rich food? So all of that came together. And how long ago was that that you started the business? We turned the website live New Year's Eve 2020. So really from 2021. And I think we got an order right away from one of our couple of our friends. We were like New Year's celebration, that lockdown 2020. And then we really started online. But because it was lockdown, we had some friends who had actually I know one of the interviews you did with the top cuvee, shop cuvee.

7:20Sarah Fulton Vachon:So they were at that time, a restaurant that had to pivot into a shop. And so we had people like this, several friends who were bartenders turning their shops into, turning their bars into shops. And so we were like, okay, we'll sell at some of these like nice shops. And that kind of started to become as we rolled out. And that first year we sold out of oil and quite quickly and started to have to make a plan for, okay, how do we expand this? How can we grow this with more oils? And over that time in the last few years, we've seen a shift in premiumization of previously seen commodities. I'm thinking beans, pasta.

7:55Sarah Fulton Vachon:You know, we're in the office here with the Bold Bean team. We are co-working space friends and absolutely adore Amelia and Ed. So I think, yeah, I remember, of course, before Bold Bean, years before we were even starting the business, being like, OK, we've seen this. And my husband was really early on and kind of led the craft spirits movement in the UK. He still actually consults with brands. Some of the other brands you've had on your track, he's something and nothing. He's the board. He's the chair. Moth. Moth. He's been with Moth since the very beginning. So he still has this world and startup drink space.

8:23Sarah Fulton Vachon:But he saw kind of what had happened in the craft spirits movement. And I was looking at, okay, coffee, chocolate. These people have had an artisan craft sustainable ethical awareness. You know, we have fair trade now in coffee and we have Tony's has disrupted chocolate. But it hasn't happened in all categories. And I think that's what you're starting to see with some, you know, the likes of a bold bean kind of coming in from maybe an artisan or another brand coming in from more of like, the labor side or someone coming in from just, yeah, the appreciation of craft. Do you think that's been a helpful shift, even if it's happening in different categories and it's changed how consumers are shopping?

8:58Sarah Fulton Vachon:Totally, because you can speak that language for us. I mean, obviously, there's a huge connection with wine. So we can talk about like terroir and the different varieties and how, you know, pairings. But if someone understands, it's funny, like you understand what percentage of chocolate you like. You should understand that from a quality perspective with your olive oil as well. Like what, you know, when you want a milk chocolate, when you want a 70 or, oh, no, I'm an 85 % girl, whatever. And you should know that with your olive oil as well and understand and have that appreciation. And so we're able to speak a shared language of quality that is beyond just flavor.

9:31Sarah Fulton Vachon:That is also the production side and the people behind it. I think it's such a positive thing to encourage people to think about where food comes from because it sounds so obvious. But we've been working with a berry brand for a long time and I've learned so much about berries. that I just honestly wouldn't have considered when you just pick up a punnet in the supermarket. And, you know, to your point about climate change and weather and soil health, and as things become more unpredictable, consumers should be more conscious of where things come from. And we kind of expect things to be the same all year round, have access all year round to whatever we want.

10:06And is that always going to be the way? Prices to be stable, you know? And we've seen with cocoa and coffee. Yes.

10:13Sarah Fulton Vachon:That's maybe not going to be the future, is it? Absolutely not. Yeah, I think that awareness helps inform people to make better decisions. And yeah, also even from just a seasonality, which has been, you know, probably two decades now, people talking about seasonality, understanding that sort of thing, which also exists even in something like extra virgin olive oil. You know, and there's one harvest year, of course, the oil can last, but like the changes, if you try that bottle in January, it's going to taste different than it does this time of year. so just yeah understanding how your food is made and to me a lot of that comes back to have an appreciation for the people who did it because if if you don't understand that quality that's gone into it you don't think you need to pay them as much as you do and especially in our category when extra virgin olive oil is sitting on shelf with refined oils that are made a completely different way they're highly processed they have none of that nutrition or flavor i'm like don't compare us to that and you shouldn't be trying to rip off this like farmer who's actually working with a fresh juice and try to compare it to somebody who's making a soda, like an orange, like Fanta, orange over here.

11:11Sarah Fulton Vachon:Like these are two completely, this person's making fresh squeezed orange juice and this person's making a Fanta. This is the difference. So you can't compare them. So I think that education is super important. It helps to cross category. How did you choose the name Citizens of Soil? What does it mean? So again, in sustainability, getting really overly excited about soil health. I mean, you can't get too excited about soil health, people. It's very important. Watching TED Talks and workshops on soil health. So we knew that was going to be a foundation of how we were working. And then because we had worked a bit in the wine space and both had done like wine courses, both my husband and I, we were already switched on to this idea of terroir and this idea of like, why does this oil or why does this wine, to speak of language people, no more, this wine tastes different on this hillside than this hillside.

11:56Sarah Fulton Vachon:And the same existed in olive oil. But terroir felt like a really elitist kind of word. But soil is really can hark to that. And then the citizens element came about because we were kind of speaking to this community side, which from the very beginning was why we were doing it, to like support these farmers. And, you know, my husband and I are both immigrants. I'm a second time immigrant. He has family different all over the world. And yet when we go to Greece, we're a part of this family and we have these connections and we felt like there's like this almost like citizen of the world, which it sounds like this whole cliche, but if you kind of appreciate things like that, because if you're buying food, not all the food in the grocery store from the UK comes from here.

12:35Sarah Fulton Vachon:So you need to actually give a damn about how people are farming in Spain or North Africa because you're consuming the food from there. So that kind of connection of the community side really came through. And we always just knew we wanted it to be, which is funny because it only later became the olive oil club that we've now built. But we really wanted this community connection back to farm and to people. One of your brand line is from commodity. Turning a commodity into a community. That didn't come about from the very beginning. That was actually probably two years in. And I think our first one was Staples making a statement.

13:06Sarah Fulton Vachon:We thought, let's just support these small producers and do all sorts of things. But I went too far into olive oil and became absolutely obsessed and just studied and trained and did my certification and just only wanted to be run olive oil. So let's talk about brand. Love your brand. I love how considered everything is. I remember I was talking about a table that you had made for the pop-up. Yes. Which I thought was such an amazing example of the kind of level of consideration that goes in. So let's talk about the pop-up. Yeah. And we can talk about the table as part of that. As the core part.

13:38As the core part of it. So it was called the Olive Oil Clubhouse. It ran this summer. I imagine it was a big step to do such a big physical activation and like a big chunk of budget because these things aren't cheap.

13:50Sarah Fulton Vachon:Yeah. So talk us through it. Talk us through the thought process behind it, how it worked, why you did it. Would you do it again? So why we did it goes back to that community side. We love bringing people around the table. We love face-to-face. We've actually just started doing, on a shoestring budget, doing workshops here in our office every month, inviting our customers down, people in our olive oil club. If you want to learn about olive oil, let's try some oils together and do a bit of olive oil one-on-one. So we always like that education side, but also just like bringing people together. And it's expensive to get a space in London, even for an event.

14:23Sarah Fulton Vachon:And often when you do that, you don't get to control the brand world. And as it probably is abundantly clear, I'm very brand focused. And I always wanted a space that felt like you're immersed in our Mediterranean slash now British life. And so we kind of took a punt. Like, we don't know if we'll make the sales back here or whatever, but we think we could do some really exciting events. I have wanted an olive oil bar from the very beginning because it's a way to experience and taste. And the UK has never had something like that. So I wanted to be the first, and we are the first olive oil bar that gives people an opportunity so they could taste it and try different pairings, understand how it could be used.

15:00Sarah Fulton Vachon:So we ran it for two weeks in Notting Hill. Had a beautiful space. Spent, blew the whole budget on this beautiful table that was the centerpiece because, again, bringing people around the table. Also, as an investment, it was quite a modular. So we worked with an artisan producer, of course, who was making it out of natural elements. and we can actually use it for a lot of other events because you can kind of pop it apart and it can have these beautiful like columns and plants which look very Mediterranean to kind of display produce and fresh seasonal ingredients which is what we did there. And then in the back we had, if you were a member of our olive oil club, you could get a free tasting, this guided tasting room where we did a couple of different food pairings.

15:35Sarah Fulton Vachon:And then we used that opportunity during the week to have different events. We had an incredible nutritionist come in because we have a core part of our audience that just wants to talk about nutrition and really dig into those questions and how much fat is too much and what sort of fats do we need and how do we incorporate this into our diet. We worked with some beautiful brands like Natura to talk about seasonal ingredients. We did fun things like one of our signature serves is olive oil and ice cream and olive oil and martinis. So we did these sort of collaborations with really exciting, always aligned with other B Corp and sustainability focused brands.

16:06Sarah Fulton Vachon:And Bold Beans had a feature on one of our pairings. So, yeah, it was a great opportunity. and we had customers, members of our club in particular, that came from across the UK. They'd make it a proper trip to come down there and do a tasting with us and go to one of the events. And that was just so special because you get to talk to them and meet with them and understand what they're looking for. And we introduced some new products and had them try some special things that were only there in the shop. Total delight, something we would do again. We certainly learned a lot of things. Running our business alongside that, we didn't hire anyone else, we were manning.

16:40Sarah Fulton Vachon:and running that shop was not probably the best decision because if you do accounting and suddenly all day you're running an event in the shop, it's not that great for your accounting side of the business that you have to do. So we'll, but it's something we actually want to do again and we'll invest in again as a great brand exercise and a way for people to experience it. And hopefully next time we actually have some of our producers come down. What advice would you give to other founders thinking about investing in physical experiences? So I think we did it at the right time. Again, you start a business and you want to do these things right away.

17:14Sarah Fulton Vachon:But a lot of it is about, of course, budget. So it's a significant investment in central London to have a space. I would not recommend it until you have a strong enough following because it's a great opportunity to bring your buyers down, your customers down, unite that community. and if we were fortunate that like all of our bins sold out and i mean god you were at the launch which was insane and more people than like even rsvp showed up and it was rammed and so hot it felt like we were in spain we couldn't have done that until the community was a certain size and so i think making sure you have that and then leveraging other brands like-minded using that space not just making it purely your own but like how can you really speak to what your community wants we didn't expect we actually did well with sales but we didn't expect it to be like just a shop that was going to make us money.

17:58Sarah Fulton Vachon:And that expectation is really important, I think. Yeah, it was beautiful. That's what I have to say. And chocolate mousse with olive oil on it is insane. Yeah, that's still one of our, actually, if you come to our workshops that we do here, our masterclasses, we still do that serve because people love it. What would you say are your key channels for driving the brand? And we'll get into your DTC business in a minute, but you obviously have a retail presence now as well. So how have you adapted how you which channels you use as the brand's grown social is of course a core part we're not the best on actually we don't try to do a lot of channels instagram is the one we focus on i know everyone's like get into tiktok so it's mainly been that channel we have a really engaged newsletter database which is really really lovely it's a great conversion channel for us we do a bit of press so the education side and like people really understanding the story is important.

18:50Sarah Fulton Vachon:But I think the brand does a lot of heavy lifting. The pack does a lot of heavy lifting to communicate what we are, what sort of kitchen we sit in. You know, there's an aesthetic side, which is just like some people want it from just style, which is fine. And then we have, you know, there is advertising is in the mix. But I think what has brought a lot of it is the story, like communicating the story and doing that mainly on social and press. you guys have such a sort of depth of storytelling capability around the brand as well there's so much to say and as you know from a workshop because there's too much to say it's too much trust me it's better than working crisps nothing to say it's i guess a blessing mostly but also a challenge and of prioritization and what for who and the health and the the land and then the taste and the pairings, but on the whole, lots to talk about.

19:45Sarah Fulton Vachon:Yeah, I think if you're a food business, you really should be leading with flavor, which is something we don't compromise on. And I'm really quite confident in our oils. I know categorically that these oils are fantastic. They've been sent to International Olive Oil Judge, and some of them have helped me source it. I've done multiple lab analysis and tasting. I know the quality is there, whether it's your preference or not. So that we're quite confident in. But then increasingly, we're seeing people switched into nutrition. So those people actually don't really care maybe about what we're doing on other parts of the business or that you can put it on ice cream.

20:17Sarah Fulton Vachon:Or maybe they don't really care that it's a small producers. They're more into just like, can I get the healthiest oil? So yeah, there's always like this balance of what story you're telling and to what audience. And I think we do try. But what we find from surveys, we do a lot of insight calls and talking to our customers and we do a big annual survey and then surveys throughout. overwhelmingly like the trust factor is what kind of connects all of our audiences. There's a lot of deception in olive oil on that, you know, claims around health and benefits and claims without showing labs or showing why that oil would be.

20:52Sarah Fulton Vachon:And then even from the commodity, the traceability side, there's a lot of headlines in olive oil. You know, every couple of years, there's a new report about, oh, this was actually extra virgin on the shelf or, you know, it's been blended with something or it's rancid. And so I think they also trust the care we put into the supply chain. So yeah. I guess even people saying, I don't like Greek olive oil, I like Spanish, is progress because 10 years ago, you would just not have a clue. And you wouldn't be able to particularly discern because like you say, it's all a mix. So even if it gets to the point where everybody knows what their favorite type of olive oil is, that'd be a good thing.

21:28Sarah Fulton Vachon:Yeah, if they have, I'd say more than region is probably style. If you know what sort of style you like or you even got, goodness, if you get to a cultivar, that'd be really exciting. And that's the beauty of having a range. And it's not just one hero product. I guess our two hero products in grocery, even those are quite different tastes, you know, delicate and more vibrant. and then with the club and the full range online you're able to really pick out a specific style because even in delicate you're like well is it delicate but it's grassy or is it delicate and it's fruity is it sweet it does have a sweeter notes or does it have you know more peppery or herbal notes and yeah that's part of the fun isn't it you get to try all these different things and everything's delicious so it doesn't actually matter yeah so let's talk about the club i'm a fully paid up member how did the olive oil club come about was it always your intention when you started the brand or is it something that kind of grew organically?

22:20Sarah Fulton Vachon:Certainly grew organically because the intention at the beginning was just to support our friends and sell their oil. I knew we always wanted a subscription so we didn't know it would be a club yet but we started off with a subscription which was these pouches alongside our bottles and that's because again working in sustainability space glass is very expensive to ship around there's breakages you have to put additional packaging for it. I really liked the model that I was seeing mainly in the skincare space of people doing these beautiful vessels, but then lightweight refills. So that was from the very beginning.

22:50Sarah Fulton Vachon:We had a bit of struggle getting it to be properly letterboxed. And we're still every year optimizing that pack a little bit more. But where it changed was a couple years in when we went from just subscribe to this oil to, OK, we don't have enough for that batch anymore. And actually, I want people to try the other oil. Like I'm finding all these really incredible farmers. I'm going out, even if I'm not going to source, I'm just going out to do a harvest day or work or learn, go to a mill and find out, just talk with this award-winning producer. I now have this network of them. So I'd like to bring over their oils and show them to some people.

23:25Sarah Fulton Vachon:So then that idea of a club came to mind. So then I think even the first year that we developed that, we still only did four different oils and we were still calling a subscription. And then when we changed it, I think it was the start of January, 2024, when we changed it to join the club, that's when it just really took off because I think people finally got it. Like it's like a wine club or, you know, a coffee club. And they liked the discovery side of it. And for me, it was just a total delight to be able to work with now 12 or more unique farmers across the year and even smaller batches and different styles.