In Search of the Perfect Peach with Franco Fubini
Franco Fubini, founder and CEO of Natoora and author of In Search of the Perfect Peach, joins Rick to explore how food, flavor, and seasonality connect us back to nature. The conversation covers how a single jarring peach-in-December moment helped spark Natoora’s mission, and why fixing the food system starts with rebuilding our taste for real flavor.
Key topics
In this episode, Franco Fubini explains why leaving finance for food gave him a much closer relationship with nature, even while living and working in a city.
- He describes Natoora’s day-to-day balance between field sourcing and business operations, with about 20 to 30 percent of his time spent meeting producers.
- Franco breaks down the “where are the peaches?” moment in New York in 1999 as a symbol of our disconnect from seasonality and from what our bodies should want at different times of year.
- He connects flavor and nutrition through the idea of nutritional intelligence, arguing that flavor is nature’s signal for what the body needs.
- He discusses how ultra-processing and added flavorings have made it harder for consumers to distinguish real flavor from manufactured flavor.
- Rick and Franco compare chef-driven influence with consumer education, and Franco explains how Natoora uses restaurants, retail shops, and learning-focused storytelling together.
- He says chefs are essential not only for volume and supply-chain development, but also for demystifying ingredients like puntarelle and artichokes.
- Franco argues that consumers should pay more attention to growers and farmers, since understanding their work helps revalue food and shift spending toward better ingredients.
- He shares his “white whale” ingredients, especially apricots and potatoes, and why the most surprising flavors often come from humble foods.
- He explains why climate change is already making consistent sourcing harder, and why the future of agriculture has to be place-specific rather than guided by one universal label.
- He closes by framing healthy soil as the foundation for complexity, nutrition, and flavor, with microbes, bacteria, and fungal networks all playing a role.
Chapters
00:00 - Franco Fubini introduced as Natoora founder and author of In Search of the Perfect Peach
01:09 - Why working in food deepened his connection to nature
03:59 - How much time he spends sourcing versus running the business
04:39 - The peach-in-December story and why it matters
08:46 - Why a seasonal fruit craving signals a disconnect from nature
10:11 - Natoora’s mission to bring seasonality and nature back into daily eating
12:23 - Why flavor and nutrients are linked
13:40 - Nutritional intelligence and the body’s relationship to flavor
15:41 - How the food system stripped flavor from raw ingredients
18:18 - Why Natoora works through both chefs and retail consumers
19:57 - How restaurants create demand and build supply chains
23:54 - Using chef influence to educate and demystify ingredients
26:45 - Why simple home cooking makes great ingredients even more important
28:54 - The power of tasting a truly great tomato
30:29 - Why growers can be the real stars of the food system
34:23 - Franco on using farmer stories to raise the value of agricultural work
35:50 - White whale ingredients: apricots and potatoes
38:50 - How climate change is affecting sourcing consistency
40:29 - Flavor loss versus crop disappearance
41:30 - Where to spend more and where there is more room for compromise
43:21 - Why farming practices have to be adapted to place and crop
46:40 - Soil health as the foundation of a healthier food system
48:21 - How healthy soil creates complexity, nutrition, and flavor
Notable quotes
“Why does her body at that point desire a peach?”
“Flavor is nature’s instinctive way of telling the body that this is something that you should be eating.”
“Healthy soil means a soil that has a lot of active life in it.”
