Nicolas Lavallierre – More Nuance and Fewer Claims

LÖV Ferments was born in 2019 from the union of two projects: a fermentation school driven by my co‑founder Robert and the kombucha project I was running at the time. We met in the small world of fermented beverages in Barcelona, and after crossing paths at various events and festivals we realised that we shared a very similar vision: we both firmly believe that fermentation is the future of food and a logical step in the evolution of gastronomy. Our goal is to democratise fermentation and make it accessible. We started out offering education, but we quickly decided to create a brand that would fuse ancient tradition with more modern techniques and formats.

Our first product was kombucha on tap. We work with technology that allows us to make the drink with organic ingredients and achieve a flavour and texture very similar to that of a beer. Today we sell our draught kombucha in bars, restaurants and festivals, and we are developing other products, like a kombucha wine that we hope to launch soon. The company was officially launched in a bar in Barcelona on March 12, 2020—and on March 13 the pandemic hit. LÖV Ferments was born and almost died within the same six‑month period. It was a great lesson in resilience.

As an engineer, the process itself has always fascinated me, and I see a lot of creativity behind it. Fermentation is a biological process that perfectly unites complexity and simplicity. Making kombucha at home is very simple—it only takes four steps that anyone can do. But if you get into the science of what is happening inside—an ecosystem where there are 30 or 35 types of microorganisms, different metabolic pathways and intermediaries—everything explodes into complexity. It’s fabulous; it reveals the depth of nature.

The food sector faces major challenges. The main one is health. For the texture and preservation of some products, ingredients or agents that are not healthy are used. The reason behind their use has more to do with extending shelf life, lowering production costs and other purely logistical motives than with the quality of the product itself.

Then there is the distribution problem: supermarkets take most of the benefit from the food value chain. In the past, this field was very fragmented; there was healthy competition and diversity. Due to several waves of consolidation, it has now become practically an oligopoly. Who loses? Small producers and consumers.

Today the big chains determine the survival of suppliers even before seeing whether customers want that product or not. And then, looming over everything, there is the environmental impact of the sector.

As a small supplier, we have to be realistic: our impact is limited. Even so, transformation lies in every decision we take, especially at the level of production. From the beginning we decided not to play the cheapest‑product game. Tea and sugar, for example, are two of the main ingredients in our products, and they come from industries deeply marked by slavery and inequality. We believe it is the responsibility of brands to ensure that the people working in those industries have the right to dignified working conditions.

On the other hand, all our ingredients are organic. We don’t do it for marketing; we do it because it wouldn’t make sense to do otherwise. We’re talking about minimums; I think they should be essential requirements for anyone wanting to sell products in countries of the global north.

Then we decided to package in cans. We looked for the most sustainable container: in the production chain, glass is a disaster. It’s a beautiful material—to me the most elegant—but its carbon footprint is extremely high, and the recycling chain behind it is terrible. The can, today, is one of the best options because around 80 % gets recycled. It’s highly optimised thanks to the big beverage industry.

Inevitably, our position on the matter changes as we grow, because having the intention is one thing and seeing results is quite another. If you do things in a completely radical way, you run the risk of staying very small without achieving a real impact. For example, if we do things “too well” by some absolute criteria, only people with a high purchasing power could afford our product, and the movement that aims to improve the world would remain isolated. Finding this balance is complicated—deciding, achieving a real impact, being accessible and doing it with a healthy growth curve. We haven’t yet found the recipe, but we keep moving forward, using our values as our guide.

In an ideal world, I would like to see shorter supply chains beyond the big supermarkets, with fewer intermediaries between producers or farmers and the end retailer. Of course, I would also like to see more fermented foods, because they play a very important role in nourishing—not just our human bodies but the ecosystem that completes and supports them.

I also imagine greater diversity of brands and projects. I move in the circle of food entrepreneurs and I’m amazed by the number of projects that emerge, each with a strong value proposition. Amazing products, really. The problem is that many die before reaching the market. I would like us to find ways to bring all these innovations to market more directly.

At the marketing and narrative level, I imagine fewer dualisms and more complexity—more grey areas and fewer extremes like “sugar is bad” or “fats are bad” or “you have to consume seed oil.” I would like statements to be more transparent, not satisfied with just achieving a clean label that, when you look closely, isn’t clean at all. In short: more nuance and fewer claims.

Personally, I think we are moving in that direction. It’s true that I live in a bit of a bubble—my background, the education I received, the content I consume—so my bias is strong. But it’s undeniable that today it’s easier to educate people about nutrition; information is more accessible than ever. People are also increasingly curious and aware of how important food and health are. These changes, although they may seem slow on a human scale, are happening and they’re significant. I’m quite optimistic in that sense.

I think that change has to come from all fronts. On one hand, from the initiative of the brands themselves, whether they are small entrepreneurs or large, established companies. On the other hand, consumer demands are very important. Go to the supermarket and ask: “Hey, why do you have this but not that?” or “Why don’t you have option X?” We sometimes forget that supermarkets listen closely to the final consumer.

On the regulatory side there is a lot of lobbying. There are big companies that manage to pass certain regulations that are really designed to serve as chains or barriers for other players. Regulation is necessary and very important, but it has to be well designed, and we cannot expect it to change on its own. We have to push: from civil society, with associations or cooperatives, through individual projects and from brands.

Sometimes it’s difficult to make healthy things sound sexy. It seems easier to attract attention through war and conflict; consensus is boring. That’s our big challenge as brands like ours: how to capture and maintain consumers’ attention.

In our case, we try to avoid grandiose claims and instead focus on aesthetics through careful, elegant product design that catches the eye on the shelf. If the product tastes good and people get close, they can see what’s behind it. But we don’t want to dive into a deep explanation before making that initial connection.

When we launched the new packaging, we saw supermarket sales increase by 120%, multiplying the category’s overall growth fivefold. This is largely due to how the product is presented.

With branding agencies something similar happens to what happens with brands themselves. There’s a lot of ‘washing’ of all kinds: greenwashing, social‑washing, etc. Many use values such as sustainability or transparency as strategies to set themselves apart. Impact is fashionable—especially because it’s good marketing. It’s hard to find agencies that understand the importance of the fine print, of nuance. With so little time to grab people’s attention, it’s easier to go for exaggeration and half‑truths. The key, however, lies in depth and honesty, in using the multiple truths that exist to tell interesting and real stories. People are tired of simplistic messages; they look for brands they can identify with and that convey values coherently and with nuance.

Looking ahead, I’d like to continue growing and have the resources to innovate and develop new categories of fermented beverages that respond to the new realities around us.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve learned a lot from ferments, especially from their constant state of transformation and their symbiosis with the environment. Nothing is static, and now more than ever we need to be aware of the importance of context: to learn to read it and try to change it when possible.