Fruitslagers

Fruitslagers — fruit butchers — work the way a traditional butcher does, nose to tail, only with crops. From their farm and the Voedselstation in Culemborg they grow, forage and process leftovers, and turn a healthy landscape into things you can eat and drink. What began nine years ago with Roze Bunker’s sodas has grown into a whole menu: Boonzaak tempeh from heirloom Dutch beans, Cul Sec as an alcohol-free alternative to wine, Field Guide spirits distilled from forests and salt marshes, a Test Kitchen of vinegars and condiments, a resto and wine garden, and an estate beside Culemborg station.

I knew the world already. The Voedselstation shop I built with Bas van Bentum in 2024 is the factory the Fruitslagers founded, the “nursery of the food industry” where all of this gets made. This time the brief was the collective itself, and everything it has grown into.

Fruitslagers turn a healthy, lush landscape into a non-alcoholic menu full of flavour.

A menu, not a brand site

A family of brands this size usually ends up with a corporate umbrella site: a logo wall, a mission statement, a page per brand. Instead, the homepage is a menu card. The front lists every brand the way a bar lists its drinks — set in Roboto Mono, with formats and sizes in a column, 340ML, 690ML, 5L — and a pill at the top flips the card over to its back, where the Fruitslagers explain the land restoration that all of it pays for. Two faces, two reasons to visit: what can I order, and why does it matter.

One frame, seven colours

Every brand page keeps the same frame — the logo pill, the navigation, the cart — and re-colours it: Cul Sec’s orange, Roze Bunker’s yellow, the greens of Boonzaak and Field Guide, the Fruitslagers blue for the Test Kitchen and the shop. The brands keep their own wordmarks, from Cul Sec’s handwriting to Field Guide’s serif, so the site reads as one house with seven doors rather than seven websites. The photography does the rest: bottles out in the vineyard, tempeh stacked on a board, the stretch tent over the wine garden.

The shop underneath

Underneath it is one Next.js site: a webshop with a cart and a product grid per brand, opening hours and menus for the resto, venue hire for the estate, and a contact form that asks which brand you’re writing about. English and Dutch ship side by side, and a ticker above the shop carries the practical bits — free shipping from fifty euros, delivery on Tuesdays and Thursdays, pick-up at the Voedselstation.