Where Authentic Craftsmanship Meets The Future Of Premium Food

Young entrepreneur Luis Jurado Laverde is transforming premium food retail through exceptional artisan products, responsible sourcing and intelligent technology, combining traditional craftsmanship with innovation and an ambitious vision for growth.

I n a world where luxury is too often defined by price rather than substance, Luis Jurado Laverde is bringing a refreshing perspective to Britain’s premium food industry. As the founder of London-based LAVERDE ARTISAN, this enterprising young businessman is proving that exceptional quality, responsible sourcing and technological innovation can coexist beautifully.

With more than 15 years of experience in technology, data and product management, Luis has created a distinctive business celebrating the extraordinary craftsmanship behind some of the world’s finest ingredients, from Sicilian extra virgin olive oil and raw honey to heritage lentils and Colombian speciality coffee.

His achievements are already remarkable. Within its first year, LAVERDE ARTISAN has secured a presence in more than 30 independent British retailers and earned recognition at the prestigious Great Taste Awards 2026 and Great British Food Awards 2026.

Yet beyond these impressive milestones lies something even more admirable: a genuine respect for producers, an unwavering commitment to authenticity and an ambitious vision for the future of food retail.

At Taste London, we take particular pleasure in recognising entrepreneurs whose passion and integrity distinguish them from the crowd. Luis Jurado Laverde is undoubtedly one of them.

In this exclusive interview, we discover the philosophy, determination and remarkable vision behind his entrepreneurial journey.

What inspired you to establish LAVERDE ARTISAN, and how did your personal connection to food influence the brand’s beginnings?

LAVERDE ARTISAN began with a question that stayed with me: why is it often so difficult to understand what we are actually buying when something is described as premium food?

My professional background is in product management, data and technology, so I naturally approached food with an inquisitive mindset. I wanted to know where something came from, who made it, what happened during that particular harvest, how it was handled, and why it deserved to be called exceptional.

But the deeper inspiration was much more emotional. I have always believed that real food is one of the purest forms of luxury, because nature never repeats itself exactly. Every harvest captures a moment in time. The rainfall was different, the temperature was different, the flowers available to the bees were different, the fruit developed under different conditions, and the people harvesting it were working through a different year. Once that harvest is gone, that precise combination will never exist again.

That idea became fundamental to LAVERDE ARTISAN. We wanted to build a company that respected those differences rather than engineering them away — a company where the story, the producer, the season and the sensory experience all mattered.

So our starting point became very simple: know the producer, know the place, understand the harvest, respect the product, and never call something premium simply because the packaging says so.

For us, true luxury is not manufactured. Nature creates it, and our responsibility is to protect it.

LAVERDE ARTISAN champions single-estate products and works directly with family producers. Why is this relationship so important to your philosophy?

Because provenance without responsibility is simply storytelling.

The relationship with the producer is one of the most important parts of LAVERDE ARTISAN. When I speak with a farmer or producer, I do not only want to know what they can supply and at what price. I want to understand how they work, how the land is treated, how the people behind the product are treated, and what challenges they are facing. Those people are the real heroes of the story.

Responsible sourcing cannot mean pushing a producer towards the lowest possible price and then building a premium narrative around their work. If we ask consumers to value provenance, we also have to value the people responsible for creating it. That means asking difficult questions. Are the economics sustainable? Are the people doing the work being treated fairly? Can the producer maintain the quality we value without being forced into compromises?

The same philosophy applies to our Colombian coffee. Following the earthquake in Colombia, our first question was not whether the next shipment would arrive on time. It was: how are the people? Some families had lost homes and essential infrastructure, and these are the communities responsible for producing the coffee we are privileged to roast and sell in London. We committed 10% of coffee sales over an initial six-month period to Red Cross support for affected communities, and joined wider efforts to collect essential items and contribute where we could.

For me, this is part of what responsible sourcing has to mean. The industry talks extensively about climate change, El Nino, crop yields and supply risk. All of those things matter, but the conversation sometimes becomes strangely detached from the people actually experiencing those conditions. A change in temperature does not only affect a coffee cherry. It affects the person who has to grow it, pick it, and support a family from it.

Product quality and human wellbeing are not separate conversations. They are naturally connected.

Your extra virgin olive oil comes from the Biancolilla cultivar in Caltanissetta, Sicily. What makes this variety distinctive in flavour and quality?

Biancolilla has an elegance that I find fascinating. Our oil is floral and herbaceous, with fresh green almond, delicate tomato leaf and a clean peppery finish. It has personality, but it does not dominate everything around it, and that balance makes it incredibly versatile.

Our current harvest comes from a single estate in Caltanissetta, in central Sicily, at approximately 900 metres altitude. The olives are harvested in November and extracted within hours of picking at temperatures below 27°C. The oil has free acidity below 0.3%. Those specifications matter because they tell you something about how carefully the fruit has been handled.

But I never want to reduce extraordinary olive oil to laboratory numbers. Ultimately, the real test happens when it reaches the table. A few drops can completely change grilled vegetables, fish, tomato and bread, fresh cheese, or something as simple as a bowl of lentils.

And because this is one cultivar, from one estate, from one defined harvest, what you are tasting is remarkably specific. It is not a generic interpretation of Italian olive oil. It is one part of Sicily, during one particular agricultural year, captured in a bottle.

The brand promises “no blending, no diluting, no compromise”. How do you maintain that standard throughout sourcing, production and delivery?

By making that promise operational. I am personally involved much further into the supply chain than is typical for a retail founder.

With our olive oil, I am involved from the harvest and extraction process through to its journey from Sicily and the final bottling and presentation in London. I want to understand what is happening to the product at every critical stage. We start with one estate and one named cultivar. The olives are harvested and extracted within hours, and we are extremely deliberate about how the oil is subsequently stored and handled.

We bottle in London, which allows us to maintain close control over the final stage before the product reaches the customer. Our bottles use dark glass to help protect the oil from light, and we pay close attention to fill level and headspace, because exposure to oxygen also matters. I supervise the bottling and presentation, because every bottle should arrive with the care of something being given as a gift — whether somebody bought it for another person or simply for their own table.

That attention extends across the collection. Our raw honey is packed by hand, and we do not heat it simply to make filling faster or easier. Natural raw honey can crystallise, change texture and vary in colour, and we protect those characteristics rather than processing them away in pursuit of cosmetic uniformity. Our Colombian speciality coffee is roasted by us weekly in London so that freshness remains fundamental to the product, and we use premium coffee bags with a one-way valve to protect the beans from unnecessary oxygen exposure while allowing naturally released gases to escape.

For us, packaging is not decoration added at the end. It is part of product stewardship. We are obsessive about glass, storage, oxygen exposure, handling, roasting, packing and presentation, because an extraordinary product can still be compromised after it leaves the farm.

“No compromise” therefore means respecting the entire journey. It also means accepting that nature should not be forced into artificial uniformity. The objective is not to make every November taste exactly like the November before it.

Consistency does not mean forcing every harvest to taste the same. It means protecting the integrity of every harvest.

Your range now includes Sicilian olive oil, raw honey, heritage lentils and Colombian speciality coffee. How do you decide which products belong in the LAVERDE ARTISAN collection?

A product has to earn its place, and the process normally begins with a conversation rather than a catalogue.

I ask questions. Where does it come from? Who grows it? How is it produced? What makes this particular place or producer different? How responsible is the farming? How is it handled after harvest? What compromises, if any, are being made?

Then we taste. A beautiful story cannot compensate for an average product. There has to be something genuinely distinctive in the sensory experience.

After that, I look for something worth preserving. It could be a cultivar, an agricultural tradition, a particular terroir, a raw production method, a coffee-growing community, or simply the character of one extraordinary harvest.

And then I ask one final question: would I still want this in my own kitchen once the novelty disappeared?

 That question is important. LAVERDE ARTISAN is not intended to become a museum of expensive ingredients. These products should live on people’s tables.

That philosophy connects our Sicilian Biancolilla olive oil with our raw Sicilian honey, our heritage Villalba black lentils and our award-winning Madrigal Colombian speciality coffee. They are very different products, but they speak the same language: provenance, character, craftsmanship and extraordinary flavour.

We probably say no more often than we say yes. I think that restraint is one of the foundations of a strong premium brand.

How do changing seasons, harvests and landscapes shape the character of your products from one year to the next?

Enormously. It is one of the things I find most beautiful about real food.

Rainfall changes. Temperatures change. Flowering changes. Harvest dates change. Bees forage differently, fruit develops under different conditions, and coffee cherries mature differently. Even when the estate, the producer and the cultivar remain the same, nature never reproduces exactly the same result.

Industrial food has trained us to see variation as a defect. We see it as information. A November harvest is not simply another production batch — it belongs to that agricultural year.

Honey makes this particularly easy to understand. People sometimes ask why raw honey has crystallised, or why one batch has a slightly different colour from another.

My answer is: because it is real.

Change the flowers available to the bees, the temperature, the rainfall or the timing of the season, and you influence colour, aroma, texture and flavour. Coffee expresses the same relationship with altitude, climate, processing and harvest conditions.

Our standards do not change — we still demand exceptional quality. But within those standards, we do not want to erase nature’s signature. Once a harvest is gone, it is genuinely gone.

I would love consumers eventually to think about exceptional olive oil, honey and coffee the way many already think about wine: producer, geography, variety, year and character. That would transform the way people understand premium food.

Several LAVERDE ARTISAN products have received recognition from leading British food awards. What have these honours meant for the brand and its producers?

We are enormously grateful for them.

In our first eleven months, our Madrigal Colombian speciality coffee received two stars at the Great Taste Awards 2026, and our Villalba black lentils received one star. Our Sicilian extra virgin olive oil and the Villalba lentils were both finalists in the Great British Food Awards 2026, and both went on to win: Silver for the olive oil (Kitchen Condiments) and Bronze for the lentils.

For a company under a year old, what matters to me is not any single award but the pattern. Every product in our core collection has now been placed in front of independent British judges, and every one of them has been recognised in some form. I do not read that as luck. I read it as evidence that the selection method works: know the producer, know the place, understand the harvest, and refuse far more often than you accept.

That validation has also extended beyond awards. Our Biancolilla extra virgin olive oil has been tasted by respected olive oil sommeliers in the UK, France and other European markets, and the feedback has been exceptional. It has also been put into the hands of experienced food and recipe writers who have used it in real cooking, not simply tasted it in isolation, and their response has been equally positive. That matters to us because an extraordinary olive oil should succeed on both levels: it should stand up to expert scrutiny, but it should also demonstrate its value where it ultimately belongs — in the kitchen and on the table.

Independent recognition also does something practical for a young company. It gives a customer who has never heard of us another reason to trust what we are building, and it gives our retail partners confidence that the standard is real rather than asserted.

But I think it is important to keep awards in perspective. The award may have LAVERDE ARTISAN’s name on it, but the quality began much earlier. It began in Colombia, with the people growing and processing the coffee. It began in Sicily, with the people caring for the land. It began with producers making thousands of small decisions correctly, long before the product ever reached Britain. So when LAVERDE ARTISAN receives recognition, I see it as recognition travelling backwards through that entire chain.

And although awards are valuable, they are not the recognition that moves me most. In less than a year of operations, thousands of families have already welcomed LAVERDE ARTISAN products onto their tables. That is extraordinary to me. When somebody makes our coffee part of their morning ritual, pours our olive oil over food shared with their family, uses our honey to sweeten breakfast, or gives one of our products to someone they care about, LAVERDE becomes part of a real human moment.

That is ultimately what food is for. No trophy can replace that.

What are the greatest challenges of bringing small-batch artisan products to the British market while keeping them accessible to consumers?

Small-batch production carries costs that industrial food systems are deliberately designed to remove. Smaller harvests, careful processing, direct producer relationships, glass packaging, specialist logistics, frequent coffee roasting in London and responsible economics all influence the final price.

You then face a choice. You can compromise the product to compete primarily on price, or you can position it so far into luxury that people admire it but become almost afraid to use it.

Neither interests me.

Our idea of accessibility is different. We are not trying to make the cheapest olive oil or coffee on the market. We are trying to make exceptional products easier to discover, understand and bring into everyday life. And that is often a question of design rather than discount.

Our Sicilian extra virgin olive oil is a good example. It is available in three formats, and each one exists for a reason. The 100ml is the traveller, small enough to take with you, or to discover Biancolilla without committing to a full bottle. The 250ml is built for two people cooking at home. The 500ml is the family size, for a kitchen where good oil is used daily rather than saved for occasions. Every format has been engineered for a specific moment. Nothing in our range exists simply because it was convenient to produce.

We took the same approach with our Madrigal Colombian speciality coffee, which we roast weekly in London. Alongside whole beans, we created speciality coffee drip bags that require little more than a cup and a kettle. They allow somebody to experience an award-winning coffee at home, at their desk or while travelling, without specialist equipment and without a grinder.

Accessibility can therefore come from product design as much as from price.

Information creates accessibility too. If we ask somebody to pay more for something, I think we have a responsibility to explain what they are paying for. Which estate? Which harvest? Which olive variety? Where was the coffee grown, and when was it roasted? Why does raw honey crystallise?

Premium should never mean mysterious.

How are British customers’ expectations of olive oil, coffee, honey and other premium pantry products changing?

People are becoming much more curious. “Premium”, “artisan” and “speciality” are increasingly only the beginning of the conversation, and customers are asking what sits underneath those words.

Which part of Italy? Which olive variety? When was it harvested? Why has this raw honey crystallised, and why does its colour change? Where did the bees forage? Where exactly was the coffee grown, how was it processed, and when was it roasted?

Those are excellent questions. They show that customers increasingly want both the pleasure of a beautiful product and a deeper understanding of what makes it special.

There is also another shift happening: premium ingredients are becoming less ceremonial. People do not necessarily want an expensive bottle that lives untouched in the cupboard for six months. They want exceptional olive oil they can put on lunch today. They want speciality coffee to become part of their morning. They want raw honey at breakfast rather than waiting for a special occasion.

That is where I think premium food becomes particularly interesting. Real luxury should not necessarily be distant. Sometimes it is simply making an everyday ritual dramatically better.

Your professional background is in data, artificial intelligence and product management. How has that experience influenced the way you have built and developed LAVERDE ARTISAN?

Almost completely. Product management teaches you that a product is never just the physical object — it is the full user journey.

How somebody discovers you. What they understand. What confuses them. What creates trust. What makes them purchase. What happens when the parcel arrives. What they taste. What they tell you afterwards. Whether they return. Every one of those interactions is part of the product.

I brought that mindset into LAVERDE ARTISAN from the beginning, together with the agility, experimentation and relentless customer listening that comes from building digital products. We analyse user journeys, search behaviour, ecommerce behaviour, customer questions, retail performance, product discovery and direct feedback.

Increasingly, artificial intelligence sits across that operating model. We already use intelligent and automated systems to support areas including inventory visibility, marketing, order workflows, customer-service operations, fulfilment planning, research and analysis of customer feedback. The important point is not automation for its own sake. The objective is leverage. If technology removes hours of repetitive operational work, those hours can go back into customer service, producer relationships, product quality and improving the end-to-end experience.

And this is only one side of the model. For our retail and B2B partners, Intelligent Retail also means removing unnecessary friction. We structure product information, commercial data and operational information so that partners can understand what we sell, how we operate and how to work with us, without beginning every relationship with a chain of emails requesting basic information. We want onboarding to be fast, clear and professional, whether the customer is an independent retailer or a much larger organisation. We also maintain established wholesale routes, including platforms such as Faire and Delli, so partners can work with us through channels they already trust.

The same principle applies to discovery. We increasingly structure our product and stockist information geographically, so digital systems can understand not only what LAVERDE ARTISAN is, but where our products can actually be found. If somebody in Edinburgh asks an AI assistant where they can buy a particular LAVERDE ARTISAN product, the ideal experience is not a generic answer about the brand. The system should be capable of identifying a relevant verified stockist nearby, where that information is available, or directing the customer to the correct online purchase route. That requires clean product data, location data, consistent terminology, and information that machines can understand without making the experience feel robotic to humans.

As LAVERDE ARTISAN accumulates more high-quality operational and customer data, these systems can become progressively more capable across forecasting, finance, purchasing, stock management, fulfilment, marketing and sentiment analysis. The business learns.

That is what I mean when I talk about Intelligent Retail. It combines the standards and human judgement of a specialist merchant with the operating discipline, data capability and speed of a technology company. For consumers, that should mean better discovery, better information and a better experience. For retailers and business customers, it should mean speed, clarity and simplicity.

The technology does not choose a beautiful olive oil or an exceptional coffee for us. It helps us build a more intelligent company around them. For me, that distinction is fundamental.

Asian cuisines place great importance on provenance, seasonality and carefully balanced flavours. Where do you see LAVERDE ARTISAN’s products fitting into Asian cooking?

With respect and curiosity rather than forced fusion. Asia represents an extraordinary diversity of culinary traditions, so I would never treat “Asian cuisine” as one flavour profile.

What is interesting is that many of those traditions place enormous importance on ingredient quality, seasonality, texture and balance. That creates very natural possibilities.

Biancolilla is elegant rather than aggressively bitter, so it works beautifully where you want fragrance and texture without masking delicate flavours. I can imagine it working exceptionally well with grilled seafood, raw or lightly prepared fish, mushrooms, tofu, vegetables and citrus-led dressings. Our raw honey can be explored in glazes, marinades, teas and desserts, where its floral character contributes rather than simply adding sweetness.

Coffee is another fascinating bridge. Japan, South Korea, Singapore and several other Asian markets have exceptionally sophisticated speciality coffee cultures, and consumers there often understand origin, processing, brewing and sensory profiles at a remarkable level. That creates a very natural conversation for a coffee like our Madrigal.

The principle for us is never to force our products into another cuisine simply for novelty. The question is much more interesting: can the character of this ingredient genuinely add something? When the answer is yes, culinary cultures can meet very naturally.

What is your long-term vision for LAVERDE ARTISAN, and which products, markets or collaborations would you most like to explore next?

We have been operating for less than a year, so I maintain perspective about how early we still are. At the same time, the strength and speed of the early traction have given us real confidence in the underlying proposition.

In that short period we have built direct-to-consumer demand, entered more than 30 independent UK retailers, received recognition from leading British food awards, and seen thousands of families welcome our products onto their tables. We are now expanding further across the UK, including into established independent retailers with genuine heritage in their communities. We are selective about those relationships too. Product quality is only one part of the customer experience, so when we evaluate a retail partner we also look at food-safety standards, customer reputation and whether the environment is right for the products and the brand.

For us, the progress of this first year is not an endpoint. It is validation. The early evidence gives us strong signals of product fit, market fit and price fit, and we have an ambitious roadmap and a deliberate blueprint for translating that foundation into scale.

Gifting is one area we are building around deliberately. Premium food gifts in Britain are too often generic, and I think provenance is exactly what makes a gift memorable. When somebody gives a bottle of single-estate Sicilian extra virgin olive oil, a jar of raw Sicilian honey or an Italian food hamper, they are not giving a commodity. They are giving a place, a producer and a particular harvest, with the story attached. That is why our gift sets and bundles are built to be shared rather than admired: the olive oil, the honey and the coffee together, because that combination is the fastest way for somebody to understand what the collection actually is.

We want to build one of the UK’s most respected premium food businesses, expand national distribution, deepen our direct relationship with customers, and selectively enter international markets where provenance-led products are genuinely valued. We are already exploring environments where discovery becomes part of a larger experience: hospitality, premium travel, gifting, workplace experiences and carefully selected brand partnerships.

But the most exciting part of the roadmap is what happens beneath the surface. As our data grows, our Intelligent Retail systems should become progressively better at understanding demand, managing inventory, improving fulfilment, supporting financial decisions, analysing customer sentiment, and connecting the right customer with the right product at the right moment.

The ambition is not simply to sell more bottles or more bags of coffee. It is to build a premium retail company that becomes more intelligent as it grows, while remaining deeply human where humanity matters most. Producer relationships. Taste. Judgement. Service. Trust.

Technology should amplify those things, not replace them.

And if we continue executing with the discipline that built the first year, I believe the data will keep demonstrating something we already see inside the business: artisan values and technological sophistication are not competing ideas. Properly designed, they reinforce one another.

You have described LAVERDE ARTISAN as part of a new generation of “Intelligent Retail”. What does that mean to you, and what do you think the future of premium food retail looks like?

I think two worlds are beginning to converge. The traditional specialist merchant has extraordinary strengths: product knowledge, judgement, relationships and an instinctive understanding of quality. Modern technology businesses have different strengths: data, experimentation, personalisation, automation and an ability to learn extremely quickly. Intelligent Retail brings those disciplines together.

The exceptional product remains the starting point. But everything surrounding that product can become smarter.

Can we anticipate what customers need? Can we make stock decisions more accurately? Can we understand why somebody considered a product but did not buy it? Can customer feedback be analysed across thousands of interactions rather than a handful? Can fulfilment respond more intelligently to demand? Can finance, inventory and purchasing learn from one another? Can a retailer begin working with us without unnecessary administrative friction? Can somebody asking an AI assistant about Sicilian extra virgin olive oil, Colombian speciality coffee or premium food gifts receive accurate information about provenance, flavour, price, availability and where the product can actually be purchased?

Those questions matter because retail discovery itself is changing. For decades, retailers largely decided how products were organised and discovered. Increasingly, customers begin somewhere else entirely: with a question. They may ask a search engine, an AI assistant, a marketplace or a recommendation system.

That means the information architecture surrounding a product is becoming almost as important as the shelf architecture surrounding it. A premium company needs extraordinary products, but it also needs clean and consistent information about those products: provenance, harvest, flavour, formats, availability, retailers and commercial context. As the quality and quantity of our data increase, our systems become progressively more useful, and that creates a compounding advantage.

But there is an important boundary. I do not want technology to make LAVERDE ARTISAN less human. I want technology to remove low-value friction so that human attention can be invested where it matters most: tasting, listening, building relationships, exercising judgement and creating remarkable experiences.

For me, Intelligent Retail can ultimately be expressed very simply: better products, better information, better decisions and less friction.

The future of premium retail will not belong to companies that simply add more technology. It will belong to companies that understand where technology creates value and where humanity remains irreplaceable.

As LAVERDE ARTISAN grows, how do you protect the intimacy and integrity of small-batch food while building a scalable business?

By being extremely clear about what should scale and what should not.

Our technology can scale. Our distribution can scale. Our fulfilment infrastructure can scale. Our customer knowledge can scale. Our ability to analyse information and communicate provenance can scale enormously.

The olive tree does not need to scale. The beekeeper does not need to become an industrial operation. The coffee producer should not have to compromise the qualities that made us choose their coffee simply because our demand has increased.

That distinction matters enormously to me. I want to build infrastructure around artisan production rather than industrialise artisan production itself.

We are building LAVERDE ARTISAN with the expectation that it can become a much larger company.

Growth itself does not concern me. Losing the reason people trusted us in the first place would. So the challenge is not to remain small. The challenge is to preserve our standards while becoming large.

Scale should make exceptional products accessible to more people. It should not require us to manufacture the appearance of authenticity after the authenticity has disappeared.

Years from now, I still want somebody opening a bottle of LAVERDE ARTISAN olive oil to know where it came from, which harvest it belongs to, and why it tastes the way it does. I want the same principle to apply to the coffee they brew and the honey they put on their table.

That is the standard.

What is the biggest challenge LAVERDE ARTISAN wants to tackle beyond simply growing the business?

One of the challenges that concerns me most is the growing disconnect between younger generations and real food. Not because younger people are uninterested — in my experience the opposite is true. Often they simply have not been given the information in a way that feels relevant to them.

I remember a young customer tasting our raw honey and immediately calling his mother. He was taking photographs of the jar and telling her how extraordinary it tasted. She looked at it and told him, “Yes, buy it. That is good honey.” That interaction stayed with me.

I have watched teenagers and young adults taste products like ours and react with genuine surprise, because they did not realise olive oil, honey or coffee could taste so different from what they already knew. That is not a failure of curiosity. It is a failure of connection.

And it made us ask another question: who decided that learning about quality food, provenance or luxury ingredients had to be serious, complicated or boring? Good food belongs to everyone, and curiosity about quality should not depend on somebody’s age, background or prior knowledge. We cannot expect a new generation to become interested in provenance, agriculture and craftsmanship if we communicate those subjects like a lecture.

So we built Taste Lands. Taste Lands is a retro-style interactive game with different levels, where people can play, explore and learn about LAVERDE ARTISAN, provenance, ingredients and the difference between ordinary and exceptional products in a completely different format. It is deliberately playful. Even shopping for premium food, discovering a product or waiting for something to arrive can contain moments of enjoyment.

I think premium brands sometimes take themselves so seriously that they accidentally create distance. We want to maintain exceptionally high standards without becoming inaccessible. If Taste Lands helps somebody become curious enough to ask why one honey crystallises, why one olive oil tastes different from another, or why one coffee changes according to origin and processing, then the game has accomplished something much larger than entertainment.

Because ultimately, preserving extraordinary food traditions also requires creating the next generation of people who understand why those traditions are worth preserving.

What has surprised you most about building LAVERDE ARTISAN in its first year?

How quickly the connection happens when quality is genuine. Age, background and even budget seem to matter far less in that first moment than I might have expected. You can sometimes see the reaction within seconds of somebody tasting something genuinely different.

We are still an extremely young company, yet in less than a year we have seen independent retailers take a chance on us, customers recommend us to their families, people return to reorder products, and respected judges recognise the quality across the range. That has been incredibly humbling.

But perhaps the biggest lesson is that consumers are far more sophisticated than businesses sometimes assume. People notice details. They ask intelligent questions. They recognise care. They understand when a product has substance behind it. And they can usually sense when something is simply marketing.

That has reinforced one of the principles with which we started LAVERDE ARTISAN: never underestimate the customer. Give people something extraordinary, explain it properly, respect their intelligence, and allow the product to do the rest.

EDITOR’S NOTE

There is something undeniably appealing about LAVERDE ARTISAN’s approach to olive oil. From its beautifully illustrated bottle to its carefully preserved Sicilian origins, every detail reflects an appreciation for craftsmanship. More