Emile Corre

At the helm of Fruitslagers stands Emile Corre. Half French, half Dutch, Emile grew up in Blijkmeer, near Amsterdam. “It was a kind of garden park, where we lived together with several families”, he says. “My mother comes from a household of squatters and artists and my father was born in Brittany, into a fishing family that harvests seaweed from the Atlantic Ocean. In Brittany we were constantly engaged with the sea; in the Netherlands we lived literally in and from nature. If you grow up like that, you can’t help but want to take care of nature. For me, nature is more important than humans – if nature is healthy, people will follow.”

At age fourteen, Emile was inspired by Ferran Adrià, the chef who made molecular gastronomy big. From that moment on, he could be found in the kitchen most days. After graduating, he travelled the world to understand how the food system works. “I went from Kazakhstan through Vietnam to the Mediterranean, picking olives, making wine and slaughtering sheep, simply to understand how our food is produced. I even ended up in Paris, in some of the more upmarket restaurants. However, I soon realised that wasn’t for me. The better you cook, the wealthier your guests become and the less connection you have with the wider public. You end up serving caviar and lobster… I found that ethically uninteresting, because I wanted to teach people something about their food.”

Alongside their brands, Fruitslagers also runs a restaurant, Cul Sec Resto, and its own production facility: Food Station. In the restaurant, visitors can taste what comes from the growers and the production process. “Are we the only super-nerds who enjoy this, or do others too?”, Emile asks. “For me it’s often: the more intense, the more exciting. But most Dutch people don’t feel that way.” 

Food Station is shared with other entrepreneurs working on regeneration. “We set it up because we wanted to share our production knowledge. We don’t aspire to be one big brand – we want to pioneer and bring others along. We’re here for change, not for business. Entrepreneurship simply makes that change possible.”

Other entrepreneurs can take out subscriptions at Food Station and, when capacity allows, source from the same growers. “It’s mainly about sharing knowledge and decentralising production. So multiple autonomous parties can run their own businesses whilst sharing the costs of machinery.”

With the existing brands now firmly established, Emile is turning his attention to future projects. One idea is a Dutch alternative to olives: premature fruits such as walnuts, plums, almonds or peaches, processed like olives until they develop a similar flavour. “What if we all started eating nordic olives in the Netherlands? Which trees would we need to plant? And what would that do to the landscape? Those are the questions that occupy me”, he says.

Emile is also searching for a place to establish a test farm focused on product development. “As a French winemaker, you are land-bound: you create a product that emerges from your land, and the terroir determines its characteristics. In the Netherlands, we often think from the end product backwards, almost forgetting nature. Whilst our product developers work from the landscape. Which ingredients contribute to a healthy food landscape, and what can we make from them? The farm will be a place where we test different cultivation methods – from rewilding to self-harvesting gardens – and develop new products. Not in order to replace our current collaborations with farmers, but to scale them.”

“In agriculture, we often pretend we know how things should be and where we’re headed, but we need to reform farming, and nobody knows exactly what that will look like”, Emile says. “We are human, and nature emerges. I don’t believe we hold the truth, or that there is only one truth. That’s why I think: open 40 farms in the Netherlands for experimentation and research what actually works over the course of fifty years.”

That pioneering mindset also explains why Fruitslagers frequently says ‘no’ to large-scale players such as national supermarket chains. “Too often we see retail turn products into hypes, which then either collapse or are taken over by a major player like Unilever. We believe in the continuity of slow growth. We want to offer space for multiple generations to pioneer with food. And we want to maintain our own autonomy. We have no investors or external capital. All we have are vegetables, herbs and a handful of very good partners and farmers we work with. That is our capital.”

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