Farm-to-fork cooking about to get easier for Victorian restaurants with Natoora’s arrival

Around 200 top Melbourne restaurants including Etta, Freyja and Hazel will soon have access to a greater variety of flavour-focused seasonal ingredients thanks to new supplier Natoora Melbourne. The pay-off for diners? Dishes heroing ethically grown, traceable produce with farmers paid a fair price for their toil. Hyper-seasonal vegetable boxes will also be available for home cooks.

Natoora Melbourne is a joint venture between beloved local supplier Northside Fruit and Vegetables and Natoora, a changemaking wholesaler and retailer founded in London in 2004 by Franco Fubini. Natoora has outposts in New York, Paris and Copenhagen, too.

"We build relationships with farmers who are creating healthy soil and flavourful produce," says Fubini, who is in Melbourne to launch the partnership. "We want to change the food system."

The aim is to move restaurants away from broadacre farms who supply standardised items built for durability and instead highlight farmers working with bespoke produce, a culinary outlook and earth-friendly practices.

Natoora uses technology and scale to be more efficient and profitable than micro-businesses like Northside. They then divert about 20 per cent of profits to farms as direct aid or to spur improvements, such as Somerset Farm in Victoria, which was recently flooded.

Northside owner Kim Driver is excited about the possibilities. "I hit a ceiling with what I could do," he says. "I was getting frustrated. I couldn't scale the way I wanted to. I was running the business by myself, doing deliveries every day, all the accounts. I didn't have support systems but I couldn't afford to hire people."

Working with Natoora has introduced efficiencies that mean Driver can focus on building relationships. "If I have more time to do that, I can get away from commercial produce and work directly with more farmers, restaurants and chefs," he says.

Chef Ellie Bouhadana at Hope St Radio is a Northside customer who's making the switch with them to Natoora Melbourne. "We don't have the time to go and source from small farmers," she says. "Northside has been doing it well but now they have more eyes on it and can delve further. I've seen people overseas use produce from Natoora and I always think it looks incredible."

Natoora also shares information about farming methods and ingredients with chefs, encouraging them to use new produce lines. For example, a recent UK newsletter gave the backstory and recipe ideas for a pumpkin that's 30 per cent sweeter than a melon. "We've been doing a lot of training," says Driver. "Our skill levels are improving daily. There's education on farming practices and we recently had a talk on soil health by Zoom."

Apparently simple changes like a new ordering system have a powerful flow-on.

"Previously, a restaurant would call or email with their order, we would enter it manually, go through the warehouse picking item by item, then go back and invoice it," explains Driver.

"Now chefs can put in orders themselves and it's printed while we're picking it, and invoiced automatically. If someone has special instructions – Etta needs really nice tops on their radishes, say –​ we have those instructions too."

In a practical sense, it means fresher produce hits diners' plates.

Though the innovations are largely behind the scenes, Fubini hopes restaurant customers will tap into the possibilities. "If people care about the quality of what they're eating and the impact their choices can have on the farming system, then they should definitely care about the supply network that restaurants have."

natoora.co.uk/melbourne