Lindsay Marie Morris

From curating art to launching a London café and landing a spot on Gordon Ramsey's highly competitive Future Food Stars, Valentina Fois's journey is full of creative turns. Though Lele's has closed, and Valentina has since moved to Rome, the brand remains successful digitally thanks to her passion for storytelling.

I sat down with her to discuss digital marketing, her Future Food Stars experience, and her take on authenticity in building a lasting brand. Plus, check out her recipe for vegan arancini!

How did you transition from art and fashion to digital marketing?

The transition came quite naturally. I have always had a passion for technology; it has always inspired me, and I'm very curious about it. So I always find myself reading and learning, and back when I used to be a curator, I did this MA in digital technologies for the art sector, which was very much about how to introduce digital technology within the art world. It could be through social media or a different way of archiving what happened to a work of art, such as coming up with ideas and different resources and having that knowledge to study combined with all the experience I had with Lele's.

Lele's had a physical community, but it was very much digital. We had nearly 30,000 followers back then. Everything was organic. We didn't invest much in advertising because I didn't have the budget back then, so that wasn't an option. So, I think what I was doing was probably done correctly because it did resonate with people. And that told me a lot about storytelling and what it means to really craft something around a brand. That's how I work right now with my customers and clients; I think about them as unique businesses and people. They all have their own story, and that story cannot be told in the same way because of the public who wants to hear the story; the segment might not be the same, and they need to be told the story in a different way because their perception is different.

So that's something I had to learn, and it's constantly changing. You need to evolve as much as the software you use; the algorithm is constantly moving. You can't fight it and say, "That's what I learned a month ago, and I'm going to stick to it." No, you need to learn. You need to progress; you need to evolve.

This is a job that many people could do. It's not a job that requires you to be a certain genius. To work in digital marketing, you need to be very open-minded, to transform yourself daily, live in time, and, like a sponge, absorb a bit of everything. When you talk about social media, it's very reductive. Because it is so integrated into everything we do, it's not just scrolling on your phone; it's the latest music, the latest trend, politics, economics, journalists, and everything on there.

 

What's been your most successful campaign to date?

Lele's is a good example of a very successful campaign. And I think the secret was that we decided to talk spontaneously and authentically. We really opened the door through the creation and cooking processes. And people appreciated that because they felt they were invited to a real kitchen to cook with a real person with real food. I think at that time, we needed a bit of authenticity, something that wasn't sleek and glamorous but just very genuine. And especially through the COVID period, people wanted to have company and wanted to be entertained, but in a friendly way. Obviously, not every brand is the same, and every brand has a tone of voice. But for Lele's, that was the winning element: the authenticity.

 

How do you measure success?

First and foremost, I measure how much I enjoy doing something. As long as I'm doing something and benefiting from it, it's successful. I don't even care about the metrics because the minute I don't enjoy myself anymore, that's not successful to me anymore. I think they go hand in hand. When you do something with dedication and believe in it, it reflects what you do. And there is a difference, and people perceive that.

Obviously, after that, the answer will be metrics. When you're talking about social media, it will be—not so much the likes—the engagement: how many times people will share. One of the most beautiful things would be when you launch a campaign, for example, to sell some cookies online and suddenly you ship them everywhere, or people come from everywhere around London or even outside London and say, "I follow you on social media. I really wanted to try those cookies." That's obviously even nicer than the like because, yes, it's great to have likes, but if you can't convert that into leads or followers.

 

You were a contestant on Future Food Stars. How did that come about?

What happened with that is that, obviously, I was very passionate about the café and the whole philosophy and ideology of being vegan and promoting healthy living and healthy eating. We weren't preaching; we weren't telling people what to do. We were just showing that there were alternatives. That created an environment that felt genuine and friendly. So we started having lots of followers and built this community around Lele's, not only online but even offline. There was a sense of family. And because of that, the team behind Future Food Stars got to see me on social media, and then they asked me.

 

Tell us about that experience and what you learned.

On a personal level, I learned that I am a little bit less diplomatic than I believed I was. It is a wake-up call when you do something; you obviously think of yourself in a way, but just because you think about yourself doesn't mean that people perceive you that way. So I always thought I was maybe a little bit calmer, but maybe I wasn't. So that's something that I had to learn and work through. So that was good. I think it's very important that you stick to your principles and what is important to you without being aggressive and with respect.

 

I was happy when I had to stick to my beliefs on several occasions. I was the only vegan on the show, and it was really a hard time. It was very frustrating. Even when we used to have lunch or dinner, there were very few things I could eat. I was on set for two months straight and was sleep-deprived, and working schedules were very tight. It was very stressful. Sometimes, we had to shoot at three o'clock in the morning. I was not used to that.

They were very good on many different levels. I met lovely people, and the production team was amazing. They were very accommodating and very lovely. But they underestimated the catering aspect.

 

What advice would you give someone interested in digital marketing?

Understand that it's a 360-degree job. It's not just about marketing, it's not just about social media, it's about life itself. You need to be on top of everything you need to know. You cannot know everything all the time. You want to have the willingness to be informed.

Study or take a course, but at the same time, put that into practice while you study. If you don't have a client, make a client up. Invent, create an Instagram account that doesn't exist, and make that your client. You can experiment and see what works and what doesn't work. 

 

What experience do you want your customers to have?

With every customer, I ensure that I tell their story, the real story, who they are, why they got to be there, and why they're doing what they're doing. That also means the way they're doing things and why. Maybe the product, if they're selling a product, is special and different from other products. But the idea is always to create a story, a narrative around them—not a narrative based on lies but a narrative based on facts. My job is just to make this narrative sexy through graphics, video, and copywriting, but I always start from their narrative. Of course, I could build a spider web of lies, and some people do this as a strategy to sell more, but I don't believe it ever pays back. It's not the way I want to work. 

 

 

 

 

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Hugo Gallardo enjoyed his job for the first 20 years of his marketing and advertising career. But at some point, he says, the fun just started to fizzle. Instead, he faced a mundane sequence of meetings, results, new business, travel, more meetings, more results, more business, and more travel. Then his wife, Annalisa, got pregnant, which made him really rethink all the meetings and travel. He was in his forties and knew he needed a change. 

"I got involved in distillation as a hobby while I was living in Australia," Hugo says. "When we started to think about what we wanted to do with our lives, we put things together. The hobby was becoming a passion."

 

Today, that drive has led him to co-found Alma Sicilian Artisan Distillery. The company produces Mater Rum and Mater Gin from sugarcane grown in Sicily, an important center of sugar production under Arab rule. 

Hugo and I spoke about Sicily's sugar history and Alma's start. He shared more about his sugarcane crops and distillation process. The former marketing executive knows how to tell a good story, something that's bound to help as the company aims to expand beyond Italy. 
 

Tell us how you got started.

I read a lot about distilling history and how the spirits we know right now have become what they are. My passion for advertising was getting lower, and my passion for distilling was increasing—the history of the different spirits, raw materials, and the agricultural parts of the raw materials. So, we decided to open a small craft distillery. The original plan was to open it in the Philippines.

But long story short, the Philippines got closed for COVID, and I got stuck in Sicily because my wife is from Sicily, and we came here to spend some time with her parents before we brought their granddaughter to the Philippines.

 

We left our housing in Milan and quit our jobs, and I started to rethink the original plan because we didn't know when they would reopen the Philippines. I had to make a decision. I decided to try to open in Sicily.

 

When I started reading about rum, I discovered sugarcane had grown in Sicily for seven centuries. So, I thought we could try it; there was good storytelling.

In the beginning, it was more of an act of faith because we didn't know where to get the seeds, if sugarcane would grow, or if the yield would be good enough to produce something in industrial terms. So, we started doing some trials.

Meanwhile, we found the warehouse when we built our distillery, and we started to buy everything we needed to be operative and then progress. It was full COVID time, so everything was closed. You had to make all the requests by email, and it was a complete pain because everything was slow. So, after three years, in January 2021, we got all the permits, and the distillery was able to start production in April of last year.

 

Co-founder Annalisa Spadaro

 

Without a background in agriculture, was farming sugarcane a challenge?

To be honest, sugarcane is an easy crop. It needs water, and it needs to be fertilized, but it's a very resistant crop. We are located outside the historical cultivation zones. There are a lot of problems with being out of the historical cultivation zones. Still, there's an advantage in that there are no diseases because there are no other sugar plantations. We cannot be infected by bacteria or fungi or whatever. 

The big challenge for us is harvesting. We have to do it by hand because it doesn't make sense to mechanize such a small plot. We are actually cultivating three hectares, which is nothing in terms of industrial production. Economically speaking, it doesn't make sense to mechanize the harvesting. And that requires a high investment in energy, work, and money.    

 

Sugarcane harvesting is done by hand.

Why did sugarcane disappear from Sicily?

The main reason was that America happened. America was discovered in the 15th century, and on his second voyage, Columbus brought with him slave labor. The soil was perfect; there was much more water available. So, the sugar in Sicily was uncompetitive in the market since American sugar was much cheaper. It wasn't profitable anymore.

 

What shocked me was that it had completely disappeared from the island's culture. The names of a few areas around Palermo are etymologically related to sugarcane, but I was curious to discover that first, no one knows about sugarcane cultivation, and second, the sugarcane industry has no remaining buildings or presence on the island.  

 

Alma Sicilian Artisan Distillery's Sampieri plot

 

You grow in Sampieri and Marina di Modica. How do the unique soil and climate characteristics influence flavor and quality?

Marina di Modica was the first plot; the soil there is almost white and retains much more water than in Sampieri, where there is red soil. Even if they are five minutes apart by car, the sugarcane grows quite differently in both places. In Marina di Modica, it is much taller, but in Sampieri, it's a little bit shorter and has a really salty flavor. We want to keep both because the first one is for our gin, and the second one, the Sampieri one, provides us with this salty olive characteristic.  

 

Yellow and purple sugarcane

 

You grow two varieties of sugarcane: purple and yellow. How do they contribute to the final product?

We are still learning about our raw products because it's the second year, and we are making some changes this year. We are using a single distillation, so the final product is different. We still have to better understand whether the difference is because of the sugarcane or the distillation method. However, the main difference is that the yellow cane has a strong olive smell, and you can feel it in the nose and the mouth. It also has this salty touch in the mouth.

The purple has this touch of wildflowers and marmalade but also truffles.

They are very different in terms of bouquet. Yellow cane is much fresher and saltier and provides our rums with something we really like: this salty olive profile. 

 

 

Alma Sicilian Artisan Distillery is the only distillery in Italy that grows and processes sugar cane directly.

 

What is unique about your fermentation and distillation process?

We are not reinventing the wheel. There is a lot of hype about natural fermentation and spontaneous fermentation, and it's something that I would like to try in the future. The thing about that is that you completely lose control of your fermentations. So it could be nice, or it could be a complete disaster.

 

Since we don't produce that much product, we wanted to start safely with the fermentation process. Last year, we used yeast; this year, we decided to change it, and we are using wine yeast.

 

We changed because the rum yeast was selected to pump certain esters and, of course, the most easy-going esters—banana and pineapple, the kinds of flavors that everyone loves. We decided to use a much more neutral yeast that shows the raw product. And we are very happy with the result.

Then, in distillation this year, we are using a small column of six plates. It's a column that we can switch off every plate. We can decide if we use the six plates, just four, or just one. It is very versatile. We just did a single distillation using the small column. Since sugarcane is a very rich raw material by itself, we felt that going with double distillation, we lost something. So, we decided to go through just one distillation.

 

Mater Rum: Made in Sicily with Sicilian plants

 

What experience do you hope to share?

There are two levels of experience. One is the people who come to the distillery; they immediately become brand ambassadors because of the location and how we work, sharing our passion, history, and what we're trying to do. I'm pretty sure the people who leave the distillery after a tasting or visit enjoy the moment. One hundred percent think that we are crazy in a positive way. 

The second level of experience is the people in a bar who are having a drink, and our product is proposed to them, or they decide to try it. And I'm pretty sure a few are surprised because it's a new provenance for Sicily.

 

Then, we provide a lot of information through our packaging and bottles, which plays a huge role in communicating what we do and want to express. In some way, I hope they get the feeling that we have just met.

 

Finally, the product: I think it's a very particular rum and not for everyone because it is white. It's not the classic Bacardi 40 degrees, 80 proof. Starting for the alcohol by volume, our rums are above 50 degrees, 100 proof, so they are much stronger in terms of profile.

 

I hope people can taste the salty olive and citrus notes—all these notes are very strong in our rums. I hope they can get a piece of Sicily with every sip.  

 

 

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