477: Chasing the World’s Best Produce with Natoora’s Franco Fubini

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. So flavor is in a way a very simple compass that doesn't give you 100 % guarantee, but it gives you as close as possible a guarantee that that product is farmed in a way and grown in a way that it has a positive impact on the planet and a positive impact on your health, because there's also a good link to nutrition. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59Franco Fubini is the founder and CEO of Notora, a high-end green grocer connecting chefs and home cooks with some of the world's best heritage produce through direct grower relationships. He's also a professor of sustainability management at Columbia University and the author of the new book In Search of the Perfect Peach, detailing Notora's search for flavor-first food and impacting our food systems in the process.

1:31Franco Fubini, this is Taste. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure. To start off today, I'm wondering if you could tell me about if there are any exciting pieces of produce in your fridge at home right now, or maybe on the countertop next to the fridge. It's interesting because I've been traveling quite a bit, so there's not a huge amount. But there's some really cool shishitos, which this year we've been messing around with letting them ripen a bit more. So some of the shishitos are turning a bit brown and some are red. I would say that's been a very, very cool product at the moment and something very new this year that we've done.

2:07Because usually you harvest them entirely green. Yeah, I was trying to think about if I've ever had a non-green shishito, and I don't think so. How does the flavor develop differently? It goes a lot sweeter. Yeah. Do you know about, I feel like I've heard statistics like one of every 20 shishitos is spicy or one of every 10. Do you have any inclination there? I mean, it's similar to the padron where you've got that kind of one to 10. I think it's cool to get a spicy one here and there. Yeah, I love it. But whenever it happens and I'm in a restaurant and I'm eating with people and then I have a reaction and no one else does, I feel a little self-conscious.

2:41Yeah, it can be a little problematic because when they are spicy, they're damn spicy. Yeah, and you're not expecting it. So it hits a little bit harder. Very much. I'm really excited to have you on the show today. I think anyone who listens to the podcast knows that I'm like a self-described produce freak or nerd. And I think that you have the coolest job because you have access to so much incredible produce. And I'm wondering if to start today, you could just take a step back. Tell me a little bit about your vision behind Notora and the kind of work that you're doing with the business today. Although I started Natura in London, it kind of predates my time in London.

3:13And it started here in New York. I was doing a lot of cooking whilst working in finance at the time. And there was a real selfish need. I always talk about the selfish need for just wanting to get access to a good quality product. And I don't know what it was with fruit and veg. It's always been very close and dear to me. I've always really enjoyed it. But so I started noticing here in New York that there was a real gap of product that tasted really good. I found it really hard to find really good quality tomatoes in the summer, even though I was going to Union Square, Green Market. And what timeline are we talking about right now?

3:52This is the late 90s. So this is like 97, 97, 98. And one of the one of the things that I really noticed was whilst shopping, we have this story at Natura that we tell internally, which is about a peach. And me going to Citarella's around Christmas time, there was snow outside, I remember very well, and this woman was asking for peaches. And the striking thing was that she asked, where were the peaches, expecting that there should be peaches at that time, right? Not wondering whether someone had sourced them. And I just found it really odd that somebody would want peaches in the middle of the wintertime.

4:27That's what I found really jarring. And so Natura kind of started there. It started with this desire to get access to a really good quality product. When I was growing up, I had access to that product by living in different, I'd say, lesser developed countries where the supermarket and the industrialization of the food system wasn't as present. And I just wanted to recapture that. And I thought that there were other people that would want a really great peach or a great tasting tomato. And that's really how it started. And the peach that you're talking about, is that where your book title, The In Search of the Perfect Peach, comes from?

5:01No, that is a different peach. That's an actual real seasonal peach, which is called Greta. It's a variety which I don't know exactly where it was originally bred. A lot of the very cool peach varieties come, interestingly, from California or from the U.S. But it's a peach that is grown in Campania, so in the kind of Naples region of Italy. And what is striking about it is that it's a white peach. But when it's at its peak, it's almost entirely red inside. Wow. What is that color coming from? It's the anthocyanins. So the same molecules that turn blueberries blue and that are in cherries. So they're very nutritious, very healthy for you.

5:41A lot of antioxidants present in there. I feel like I was just talking about how I think peaches are my favorite fruit. I think they're kind of like lusted over in a way that like maybe tomatoes reaches a similar level of status. But I feel like there's something about stone fruit that has like this extra high level of interest for people. Do you see that in the business? A hundred percent. Yeah. Both of those products that you mentioned, tomatoes and peaches. And I think interestingly, where you see the biggest gap in flavor with like supermarket produce is in things like peaches and tomatoes.

6:16Yeah. Probably the two that if we were to do a poll and ask people, where do you notice the difference? I think you'd say tomatoes would certainly be there. And then it would be stone fruit. And why do you think that is? I think there's an element of eating the product in its raw state and the fact that they are fruits. And fruits, this is my belief at least, fruits have been designed to be eaten so that those seeds then get dispersed. That's the way that the plant figures that it's going to distribute its seed. so they're meant to be eaten and therefore the flavor i think is geared for that for animals to really want them so really high in sugars you know if you think about a carrot a carrot is the root of a plant the carrot never designed itself to want to be eaten right whereas a fruit has been designed by evolution by that plant to be its reproductive mechanism and it does that by wanting to be eaten so i think that that's where you get fruits that taste the way they do and i I think that's the main driver of this allure that we have with something like an incredible peach that is perfectly ripe in terms of just the complexity of flavor, the sweetness, the juiciness.

7:28Yeah, I think also maybe the fact that tomatoes often undergo refrigeration when you're transporting them to a big grocery store. I feel like as somebody who works in food media, you always see that you should leave your tomatoes out on the counter. Like they shouldn't have to undergo that process. So I wonder if that maybe is impacting flavor differences a bit as well. A hundred percent. Yeah. The logistics component, right? So the movement of product is important in produce distribution or in getting food into supermarkets and into our plates. And the issue with fruits is that when they're at peak, they're very delicate.

8:01So inevitably, what we've done is we pick them when they're not ripe, and then we transport them and get them onto supermarket shelves and they sit there. And that's where you get the big problem and the big lack of one of the big issues with flavor on those products. Yeah. So when we talk about flavor, I would say the thesis of your book, In Search of the Perfect Peach, is that flavor should kind of guide how we're trying to fix the food system, which we know is in this really industrialized and kind of capitalistic state. Can you kind of unpack why using flavor as a guide is a good metric for thinking about food systems in a different way?

8:37I think there's an emotional component that for me is important. so it starts, this is the trigger, and then I'll explain to you why flavor is important. But the trigger for me is important because sometimes we just want to have a really good tasting tomato, right? And if I can win you over with flavor, then your purchase decisions hopefully will get altered and get changed. And you'll want to have another really good tomato and not go for the supermarket one. So flavor has this emotional, this really visceral connection with us. So flavor is in a way a very simple compass that doesn't give you 100 % guarantee, but it gives you as close as possible a guarantee that that product is farmed in a way and grown in a way that it has a positive impact on the planet and a positive impact on your health because there's also a good link to nutrition.

9:32Yeah, I feel like there are a couple different case studies in the book that you talk about as examples of like how a specific varietal could have only been created in a way that is based in like generational knowledge instead of industrialization and like radicchio I think is one example that comes to mind. Do you think there are any specific items of produce that people could think about as like a more practical example of why the taste means that it was being grown in a good way? It's a very good question. I mean, it all does, but I think of rhubarb as another one of those examples. Perhaps the way to answer it is that any ingredient that has complexity to it in terms of flavor, where you don't just get sweetness or you don't just get this flat taste, but you get some sweetness, you get acidity, you might get floral notes, all of that complexity equals nutrition in a way.

10:27And you build that nutrition through really good soil practices and healthy soils and good varietals and good farming methods, right? So where you see complexity, and complexity is also a function of the varietals. So that's where you get to, you know, this radicchio in veneto. You get the whole, I guess, trifecta. You get the variety, you get the soil, and you get the farming practices. So I think talking about flavor as a guide, obviously, chefs come to mind as people who would be interested in trying different varietals, maybe ones that are less familiar because they want to beat everyone else in terms of having what's there first.

11:06I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about how Natura's history of partnering with chefs has shaped the business. Yeah, it's interesting because we set up to fix the problem for consumers. And then a couple years in, we started supplying restaurants and it really transformed the business and it transformed it in part because of these partnerships that we started building and how it stimulated the kind of sourcing that we needed to undertake. So chefs are very busy, but at the same time, they're really pushing the boundary in terms of flavor, in terms of innovation in the kitchen. And that leads you, if you want to differentiate yourself, to source and source and source so that you can find that product, you can improve on the quality, you can improve on the varieties, You can widen the range.

11:56So the chefs have been instrumental. I mean, Natura wouldn't be what it is today if we didn't have the backing of the chefs to really guide the way that we've evolved our product offering and push the boundaries on flavor. In practice, what does that look like? Is it like everybody wants ramps so you find more ramp sourcing or how does it work? That's one example, right? So you have a product that becomes really popular. We were talking about, what was it? The cabbage, the Caraflex. Caraflex cabbage, yeah. Outside. So a lot of demand, you need to find multiple sources for it. Sometimes it's wanting to find a point of difference in the marketplace.

12:34So you're starting to look for varieties that no one else is sourcing or trying to bring a variety that you've seen in one region into another region. So there it's a little bit more about getting creative or finding farms willing to try new things. So, yeah, I can take a couple of different guises. Yeah. I'm really curious about how you go about building relationships with farmers and maintaining them over the years. In the beginning, did you already know about these farms that were doing special things? Did you have like a whisper network of people that were saying like, hey, this guy grows great radicchio?

13:10No, we didn't. And it's funny, a lot of people ask us, like, how do you find product? First thing to say is that it's very different at the beginning than the way it is now. And then it depends by region, right? So - We're talking like 20 years ago, right? Yeah. Yeah. So 20 years ago, our farming network was inexistent. We didn't have the volume to buy straight from farms. So we had to develop that. So it evolves. At the beginning, it's a little bit like detective work. You're just going about trying to find products. Sometimes you go to a market and you see a box of product. You see the region.

13:47You might go and contact that farmer that's on that box if their address and number is there. So there's been a lot of that over the years. As that network grows, it becomes easier and easier because you build that whisper network that you allude to where you kind of, you know where the good farms are. You get recommended to farms. People are friends. So the network, you kind of start getting embedded into the farming community. Yeah, I would imagine also on the consumer end, things have just shifted so much in the past 20 years. Even the fact that we're talking about, you know, Caraflex as a status cabbage or sun gold tomatoes.

14:19I would say over the past couple of years, produce has really gotten a cult following for specific varietals. Is that something that you've noticed as a shift on your end too? Very much. And what does that look like in practice? Does that mean that you just have to chase down everyone that's growing good sun gold? How do you try to meet the demand without maybe like overreaching? One of the best ways to do that is to do farm planning or crop planning with farms and just making sure that we are predicting where the market is going and that we can then work with select farms to grow more of a specific product.

14:52That's the best way that you plan kind of medium, long term. Are there any like specific products that you guys have previously forecast as being popular or maybe things that you're anticipating for the future now? I mean, one that's worked incredibly well is the Delica pumpkin that we bring a little bit here to the U.S., but we actually want to start farming it in Mexico or in the U.S. But in Europe, the growth of that product has been probably, if not the single greatest success in terms of product, one of the greatest successes that we've had. I'm like racking my brain trying to think if I've ever eaten this before.

15:31What makes this pumpkin so special? So it's a kabocha variety. There are a lot of kabochas. In Italy, they call it a delica. What makes it really special is the curing practice. So it's farmed really well by a good friend of mine, Oscar. But importantly, what he does is he mimics the curing process that a lot of pumpkin farmers used to do at a very artisanal level for their own consumption. So pumpkins get stored in a cellar, in a kind of packing shed, with heat and dehumidifier. So you control the moisture that's coming out of the pumpkin, make sure that the pumpkins don't rot. And what you end up doing is you concentrate the flavor because it removes about 30 % of moisture.

16:16So if you can imagine that a pumpkin that's weighing, you know, five pounds will end up weighing three and a half pounds, right? It loses a third of its weight. And that concentrates flavors, concentrates sugars, adds complexity. I think the success was down to the fact that in the fall, and I guess with people moving more and more towards plant-based, if not diets, more vegetable-based products on menus, the Delica Pumpkin is such an incredibly tasting ingredient that it can replace protein very easily. So I think it became incredibly popular because of that. It just fits this really beautiful gap in the market for products that can stand on their own.

17:01It makes me think a little bit about honey nut squash and then the row eight seed squash. I can't remember what that one is called. It's like a honey nut. Koja nut. Koja nut, yeah. Which I think honey nut is popular in the U.S. largely just because it's so adorable and like you can cut through without having to deal with the butternut stem in that kind of way. It's kind of interesting to think about use cases for like produce as a product. Like how much are you talking with farmers about trying to tweak elements of them to be like a better product? Not in the way that you describe. So we do talk a lot about and I guess because most of the people we work with are chefs.

17:39Right. So when you get to the consumer, I think that the use case is fundamental. And it's part of the reason why we as humans consume a lot of fruits. So tomato being a fruit, cucumbers being fruits, like the vast majority of what we consume tend to be fruits. And I think it's because of this ease of preparation that you get. But we do talk a lot to farmers about harvest time, about sometimes about selecting product at different stages so that we can tweak the way that a product behaves in the kitchen. Can you give an example of that? I mean, a fantastic example is a whole category we created, which is green citrus.

18:16So I was inspired by bergamot, which is a citrus, which gets used for essential oils and a lot of perfume. Tea sometimes. Tea, yeah, for Earl Grey, exactly. And it's harvested in its green state. Now we started sourcing bergamot, fresh bergamot, which was impossibly hard to find back in the day. No one was using it except for the industry. And it gets harvested in the green state because the essential oils are much more volatile. You just get this incredible floral fragrance out of it. And I was in a citrus grove on holiday in Positano, the Nerano Positano, Sandimalfi coast. And I saw some oranges that were in their green state.

18:57It was September, end of August, beginning of September. So probably about two months before they were ready, maybe three. And that led us to creating a category of citrus, which we call green citrus, which gets harvested anywhere from one to three months before the citrus is ready. So we selected three varieties and on the back of that we created a new category which is the citrus that gets used in a completely different way to the ripe citrus. So that was a way that we really modified in partnership with the farmers when something gets harvested so that we can create a different product category.

19:35Right. And is it being used similarly to bergamot in terms of tea, infusion, that kind of thing? Or is the green citrus category having more experimentation? Much more experimentation. So it's getting used a lot. And we're doing this and we've done this in Europe for many years. We're now under the third or fourth season here in the U.S. So it's being used a lot in desserts and also in fish cooking, I would say, primarily. Yeah, I would imagine it would have a really kind of unique and delicious perfume. I want to get your thoughts on different growing regions around the world. I feel like what I would imagine would be a fun part of your job would be getting to go to different places and touring farms.

20:16And I'm curious if there's a specific region that has a terroir or just growing practices that is especially close to your heart. One that I don't talk about a lot is Sardinia. Because Sicily is kind of one of those that comes to mind. I enjoy going to Sicily a huge amount and I go there a lot. But Sardinia is really incredible. There's something about islands that make them very magical. They're a little bit more insular. But what Sardinia has is it hasn't been farmed very aggressively. Sicily has. A lot of parts of Sicily have been used to farm very intensively, primarily tomatoes. Sardinia just hasn't had this.

20:57So the soil there is in an incredible state already. And I've tasted some of the most complex products in Sardinia. It's also, I mean, anywhere in Italy, you know, from a food perspective, you can't go wrong. So it has that going for it. And it's a little bit more. Have you ever been to Sardinia? No, but now I want to go. Sardinians are very terse people. Yeah. And that makes it quite cool. They're like their own kind of ecotype. And the landscape is like that as well. You drive around and it's just a little bit more wild. There's tons of wild fennel growing. I don't know. It's just got—you feel like you're 20, 30, maybe even 50 years behind.

21:47It doesn't feel like you're in the 2020s. And to me, that just provides this—I don't know if you can say rusticity, this kind of rustic element, this kind of gritty back-to-earth element about Sardinia that is fantastic. So whether it's the people, the food, the climate, the physical beauty of it, and the soil makes for a really incredible product. Yeah. And you moved to New York four years ago, maybe. I'm curious what you think about the growing region we have here in like the northeast, like tri-state area. Are you going to the farmers markets here? And do you feel like there's anything special or good happening in this part of the world too?

22:25I do. I think there's a lot special that is happening here. We work a lot with farms all the way from New York up to Vermont and down south as well into South Carolina. And now we're doing some work in Florida as well. But I think one of the exciting things that you see in the U.S. more so than in Europe is the number of young farmers. And particularly in our space, in looking at farmers that are, what label can I use? that are farming with a soil first mentality, that have gotten into farming for the love of the environment, love of good quality food, that are wanting to do things right. Most of the farmers that fall into that category tend to be young here in the US.

23:07And I think it's part of the kind of entrepreneurial spirit and nature of the American spirit that I think just has bred a lot of movement in that sector of the farming industry, which you don't see in Europe. So I see a lot of hope and opportunity here in the U.S. Yeah, I'm glad to hear it. I think something that I noticed that was interesting when I moved to the East Coast after growing up in California, certainly the level of apples and the way people feel about apples was new to me. But I think also I've been seeing a lot of farms on the East Coast that are growing heritage vegetables from different immigrant communities and like having them be available at the farmer's market as well, which is kind of a cool thing to get to see.

23:49Yeah, it's very cool. But you know, you coming from LA, I mean, over there, it's it's a luxury. It's not really fair to compare. Yeah. I mean, I love New York and I am very happy to live here. But when my mom sends me photos of the farmer's market in Santa Monica in March, and they have strawberries that she's had they've had for weeks already and things like that, it does make me feel a little sad. Yeah. I think Santa Monica farmer's market was the first, and this is not to say anything bad about the incredible farmers that you find around the US, but my experience at Santa Monica my first time was that I had seen things there that impressed me to the level that I had been impressed in other travels like in Europe and in Asia.

24:32Yeah. There's things that are being grown and sold there, like Buddha's hand or cherimoya that I feel like you can't find at the supermarket. It's a really specific thing that's happening. Yeah. So earlier you talked about how the idea for Natura in part came from seeing somebody that was looking for a peach out of season. I feel like that's obviously coming from a sustainability perspective that we should be eating seasonally. And I know that you actually are a professor of sustainability management at Columbia. And I'm curious how you think about sustainability in working with Natura. Obviously, soil health is a part of it.

25:07But then I think if I hear about shipping things from the other side of the world, like that comes at a cost as well. So how do you kind of approach that? There are two things that I'd like to say. One is that I think that if you are to achieve significant level of impact, which is what we want to achieve. And this is a kind of broad argument, but you'll see where I'm getting to. So if you want to have really significant impact, you need to do it at scale. In order to shift people's consumption at scale, you need to meet people in the middle in a way. So compromise is fundamental. And this is true, I think, in terms of moving any sort of consumption.

25:48So it can be a matter of price. It can be a matter of availability, accessibility. So our perspective at Natura is that we live in a world that is globalized. We live in a world where I'm not saying that air travel is fundamental. We can travel less and we can live more sustainably and make better choices. But travel is a good example where we all now live far from our families, or most of us do. The world has changed significantly. So it's fundamental that we do travel if we are to see our families. So the world has changed. We're in a more globalized world. The food system is globalized. And therefore, you need to think cleverly about the choices that you make.

26:32where do you feel that the choices that you make lean more on having a positive impact or negative impact? And in the case of transporting produce, I'd say that we transport a handful, literally a handful of fresh ingredients from Europe to the US. But those that do come, we believe that the cultural preservation, the cultural heritage that we are preserving and that we are in some ways stimulating far outweighs, so creating a bigger market far outweighs the transportation of those ingredients a long distance. Also in practical terms, transport is a very small fraction of the total carbon footprint of an ingredient.