A MESSAGE FROM THE FOUNDER

The world did not need another snack. I am aware of this.

I started ASTROVE because I spent most of my childhood not understanding food at all.

I was loved. I was fed. I was also overweight, and I knew it. Nobody failed me. I simply had no idea what I was eating, or why it mattered.

Most children meet food through whatever happens to be in the cupboard. Bright packets. Big claims. Engineered flavours. Ingredient lists nobody reads. We form the habits years before we learn the words to question them.

Then food became my job.

Hotel school led to my first job at a five-star, five-diamond hotel, and eventually to Aspen, where hospitality is practised as though every detail is being graded. Usually because it is.

Then came tea. I trained as a certified tea sommelier and went on to manage one of Victoria's most iconic tea rooms at the Fairmont Empress.

Tea trains your attention. Where it grew. Which cultivar. What altitude. When it was picked. Change any one of them and you are drinking something else entirely.

Hospitality added the rest: respect the ingredient, know where it came from, and do not fiddle with it just to prove you can.

Which brings me to fruit.

Fruit is not a revolutionary idea. It has been around considerably longer than we have, arrives fully finished, and has never once required a marketing department. The job is mostly to stay out of its way.

So that is what we do.

We find exceptional fruit where it grows best, in the season it is meant to be picked. We freeze it. Under vacuum, the ice turns straight to vapour (sublimation, if you enjoy the word). What remains is light, intense and still unmistakably itself.

A mango should still be a mango.

Obvious, yes. Obvious things are often the ones most worth defending.

There are easier ways to run a food company. Engineer a flavour. Launch forty variants. Buy fruit from wherever is cheapest this quarter, then sand down the differences until every bag tastes the same.

We took the inconvenient route.

Variety matters to us. So do provenance, ripeness and the particular character of each harvest. If the fruit is not ready, we wait. The fruit does not negotiate.

We are not trying to improve on nature. Plenty of people have tried. We would rather know when to leave well enough alone.

There is probably something personal in that.

I cannot go back and change how I grew up with food. What I can do is take everything hospitality taught me about ingredients, origin and attention, and build the company I wish had existed back then. One that does not ask a child, or an adult for that matter, to decode what they are eating.

One ingredient.
No theatre required.

Although, judging by this website, we are not entirely against theatre.

Jay
Founder, ASTROVE™