The Road to the Hottest Chillies and Beyond with Freyia Labs
Vasilis Joseph and Greta Skemaite share their experience founding Cyprus' leading healthy, sustainable, and probiotic food and beverages.
As the world is moving towards a greener and healthier future, few initiatives innovate to bring healthier alternatives grounded in scientific evidence. Freyia Labs is one such venture that is revolutionizing the probiotic industry with its microorganism-driven innovations. Built on pillars of sustainability, the brand is a testimony to the potential of marrying local nuances with global ambitions.
But what fuels this enterprise that boasts an extensive product range catering to diverse tastes? At the heart of Freyia Labs is a profound love for cultivating - a journey sparked by a youthful fascination with mushrooms and chili. Today, we delve into the story of this 100% plant-based venture that's grounded in the principle of circularity, touching every facet from waste management to raw material sourcing and customer involvement.
Join us as we converse with the minds behind Freyia Labs of Vasilis Joseph and Greta Skemaite and learn how passion, resilience, and innovation have converged to shape this dynamic brand.
I grew up in a family with health at the forefront. My father is a doctor. He deals with holistic medicine and specializes in biological medicine and bioresonance. His approach is not conventional, in the sense that he targets the root cause of a health problem, rather than treating the symptoms. He deals with the problem from a nutritional point of view and he’s able to understand, biologically, what’s happening to you and guide you to a healthier way of living.
This was my day-to-day life. When I was younger, I got very inspired by cultivating. More specifically, mushrooms, plants, and flowers. So I started reading about how to cultivate them and their nutritional value. Out of this drive, I created, using everyday materials, an entire growing system. Even back then I was invested in creating efficiencies and even found ways to automate elements. It was my passion and I valued it greatly. I love plants and flowers, so I was always gardening.
Fast forward a decade and some change, I traveled with Greta to meet her family, and her aunt had some interesting looking cherries, but rather they were fermented chillies. She gave me some seeds which I brought back to Cyprus with me. This spurred on my second obsession, the first being mushrooms and the second being chillies, leading us to experimenting and innovating with them, creating natural, healthier foods.
Ultimately these efforts resulted in our founding of Fire Alchemy by Freyia Labs, bringing chillies to the table as spreadable jams and sauces. Mushrooms, however, are not currently part of our product line, but they remain a significant part of our development where we see a potential pivot to a more focused business on mushroom cultivation for nutrition and health benefits.
The most significant thing is that these two elements come together to form the farm-to-table initiative, establishing that Freyia Labs is purposed to disrupt the probiotic industry through innovative, microorganism-driven alternatives helping people live healthier lives.
Freyia Labs is purposed to disrupt the probiotic industry through innovative, microorganism-driven alternatives helping people live healthier lives.
After years of delving into the art and science of cultivating mushrooms, plants, and flowers solo, I focused my career in marketing with the purpose of understanding how to amplify business’ reach and impact. I was a part of a global, digital organization when it was still nascent in Cyprus, and we grew it into a large hub for the organization. I eventually moved on to open my own creative marketing agency called PinkPanster, focusing on the F&B space. In the meantime, I was managing a property.
On my way to that property, I got into a traumatizing car accident with Greta in the car in 2018. I broke my spine in this accident, after which I could not live or work normally. It was a long, difficult, and arduous recovery that would not have been possible without Greta, friends, and family by my side.
I had to shut down PinkPanster and began reconsidering the next step in my career. During my recovery, Covid-19 struck the world, forcing me to reinvent my career yet again. It was at this moment where I turned to Greta and said “I’m going to be a farmer,” to which she replied, “you do what you have to do.”
Thus began our journey with Freyia Labs as co-founders, bringing us to where we are today. So, no, it wasn’t necessarily a part of my vision, but I suppose it was always in the books.
It almost feels as though we were destined to build Freyia Labs, which we named after our daughter. What started out as experimental stages in fermenting and cultivating chillies and successfully participating in small markets has now transformed into the establishment of a promising start-up with a strong and determined vision for a healthier future. Freiya Labs’ Fire Alchemy is the first of many to come.
I always found my own solutions for things. The way I got into it was by reading books. I wanted to know what big producers were doing. I got fish tank equipment, wired it up with something I got from a shop, hijacked how it works, and created my own setup. I would buy different colored lights to influence how the mushrooms, flowers, and plants would grow. This was when I was a young teenager.
Today, I built everything from scratch in my own home with Greta’s help. I would study and research what kind of equipment labs today use, such as incubation chambers and sterilization boxes, which I built and installed through studying and figuring out how it all works. I am still obsessed with efficiency and optimization, leading me to find ways to automate processes. If I had AI tools then, I would have definitely used them to help me learn and absorb information.
I use AI tools today to process vast amounts of data, however, we are a people-first organization. If we can hire someone to do the job, we would rather do that. But, AI tools are incredible in the ways they can help us process and analyze data to make better decisions.
Ultimately, what I do is a mixture of science, and art. There are so many elements to consider. AI, for example, can think clearly for me, but how will it know when food tastes good? It may know, by analyzing the parameters, to the soil from which the plant is fermented. AI can calculate and identify various possible trajectories for projects, but humans need to verify their efficacy. For these reasons, I think AI is great, and in modern lab environments, it only enhances production and methods.
I use AI tools today to process vast amounts of data, however, we are a people-first organization.
My interest in mushrooms and vegetables helped me in experimentations on creating variations of foods tailored to specific needs, or just general curiosity. In my journey, I used Facebook Mentors through which I found a lady called Maria in South East Asia who was feeding impoverished communities with mushrooms that she grew from the by-product of her rice farm. She taught me a great deal about cultivating mushrooms and plants, enhancing the nutritional value in our products.
We use microorganisms in controlled environments to find ways that we can grow foods that can offer the healthy and rejuvenating factors all packed into each product. It can definitely be applied to other avenues of health and food and beverage. I started fermenting drinks and various other foods. It just takes a daring attitude to learn, make mistakes, and very diligent research and analysis.
One significant lesson was the value of a network. People have helped me in various ways along my journey, like Maria Howard from HeroesMade who introduced me and connected me with IDEA, helping me realize my capacity as an entrepreneur. I am very grateful for Maria and the opportunities she helped me open doors to. Maria from South East Asia was another incredible source of knowledge that I discovered out of an insatiable curiosity.
A legend, Jason White, director of Noma Labs in Denmark, is a mentor that I am eternally grateful for, and he has joined my board. I had done a course with Harvard on fermentation, he was lauded as a pioneer in this space, and I was following him online. I messaged him expressing my gratitude and interest to learn more. This prompted him to reach out to me, we got to know each other better, and he offered his time to guide me and access to his network.
Another is taking the chance to learn, especially something that I didn’t really understand. Achieving this, at higher levels, is about being daring and curious. Having that daring nature and curiosity from a young age definitely helped me to develop the habits that I have today, but they are also met with an unrivaled drive to make things happen.
Achieving this, at higher levels, is about being daring and curious.
Use the technology you have at your disposal. Be curious and creative. Take the chance and reach out to someone in the field that you are in, you never know where it could lead. Taking risks is part of the journey, especially for an entrepreneur and startup founder. Be crazy, and become obsessed.
Something else is to become so obsessed that you don’t want to throw money at solutions to make things happen. Let’s say you want to build an app; learn how to program. Learn about all of the intricacies involved in what you’re doing, and learn how to do all of it yourself. Sacrifice 100 percent of your time to the one thing that you are doing. Your network is a critical resource from which you can learn from and gain greater access to the space that you are involved in.
I have to highlight the impact of having a supportive partner and co-founder like Greta. Our collaboration and her expertise really helped me to turn this obsession into a tangible idea that can have a powerful impact on society for the better. Whoever your co-founder is, you must be able to trust them whole-heartedly and share a passion in what you are doing.
Overall, create a supportive environment, become obsessed, build a network, and take calculated risks. That is a formula that has helped me, at least.
