Franco Fubini, founder of Natoora, looks at his revolutionary food network through the lens of a mango

Franco Fubini has revolution on his mind, but back when this whole thing started, he just wanted his food to taste better. An interested home cook living in New York, Fubini found himself frustrated that access to smaller producers – especially those with a focus on flavour – was limited. Even if restaurants could forge their own connections, the complexities were often prohibitive, the resources limited. His answer was Natoora.

Launched 18 years ago, Natoora was initially conceived to connect people on the street with more delicious ingredients, but instead came to supply restaurants, then narrowed its scope to fruits and vegetables. As it expanded – to LA, London, Copenhagen, Paris, Malmö and now Melbourne – and built networks between growers, chefs and the public, what began as a quest for flavour took on a revolu- tionary air.

“Today we talk about the food system revolution,” Fubini says. “It’s about sourcing really great-quality produce from really great producers that are doing right for the land, the environment and biodiversity.We can then help create a better food system, or move the food system into a better place.”

There’s soil health and hyper-seasonality and supply chains and biodiversity, but Fubini’s not here to talk about them. He’s here to talk about mangoes. But then, maybe that’s the same thing.

Like a tomato with flushed red skin that gives way to tough, insipid flesh, mangoes can seemingly burst with promise, then fall short where it counts. The reason, Fubini says, is down to the demands of a globalised food system, with shelf life and presentation prioritised over what’s going on beneath the skin.

“You harvest mangoes very green, they’re not grown for flavour, they’re put on boats, and inevitably the product that you have at the supermarket shelf, whether it be Wholefoods here or Tesco in the UK or perhaps Coles in Australia, they end up with a mango that is inferior to the real deal.”

Two fruits linger on Fubini’s palate as sweet, fragrant ideals: his first-ever mango, eaten as a child while living in Egypt, a revelation for a kid from Argentina where mangoes were virtually non-existent; then later a wild mango in Brazil, no bigger than a lemon, grown with zero intervention. “They’re scarred all over, they’re blotched. Sometimes you can barely see the skin colour because they look all black, and yet inside you’ve got this incredibly bright, orange, absolutely beautiful fibre- free flesh with a flavour that is incredibly, incredibly intense and complex.”