Switzerland's first online luxury food firm launches

Neuchâtel entrepreneur Marc Biver switches gears from managing a cycling team to running Luxfood, a company that sells gourmet products through the Internet. The website begins taking orders this week as Biver teams up with his girlfriend and renowned chef Philippe Rochat to spearhead a service that provides home delivery of delectable goodies via the post. Marc Biver has gone from managing Astana, the Kazakh professional cycling team, to launching an online fine food company called Luxfood. The Neuchâtel-based entrepreneur switched gears when the Astana team was hit with scandal as its team members were fingered for illegal drug use. The team was banned from the Tour de France last year. Feeling “sick and tired” of the cycling business, Biver decided to start up again in a completely different vocation. 

A longtime gourmet, he got the inspiration for his new website as he was coming back from the French cycling race in the summer 2007. “I was talking with my girlfriend whose family is in the food business,” Biver said. “Why not sell chicken? I first said as a joke. And then I thought about it and realized that nobody offered top-quality fine food on the Internet in Switzerland.”

His girlfriend, it turns out, is Caroline Lehnherr, who knows a lot about gourmet food and is co-founder of Luxfood. But Biver, brother of Jean-Claude Biver, the head of watch making company Hublot, was also able to count on the expertise of a friend who is a world-class cook. He broached the idea with Philippe Rochat, the chef at the renowned Restaurant de l’Hôtel de Ville in Crissier (Vaud). Rochat loved it and promptly joined the project.
Luxfood began operations yesterday. It was inspired, Biver said, by other on-line shops such as leshop.ch but with a narrower, more particular focus. The site offers only exclusive, rare and fine food and wine, mainly from Switzerland, Italy and France. The products are selected under rigorous criteria by Rochat, who also produces some of them. “But exclusive does not always mean expensive,” Biver said. “We sell a range of products for all types of budgets, from private individual food lovers to companies.”
Home-made marmalades, rare spices, olive oil, top-quality champagnes (in partnership with leading French luxury group LVMH), caviar and foies gras are among the items on offer. The site promises many discoveries for “cyber sybarites” in Switzerland. Biver, who invested 200,000 francs in the project, said that it was the originality and exclusivity of the concept that appealed to the chef from Crissier. “Rochat had been approached by many top distributors but had always declined propositions.”
Luxfood’s goods are delivered by La Poste (the post office) one business day after the date of order. But it is also possible to pick up products directly from the company’s head office in Saint-Blaise, a community that overlooks Lake Neuchâtel, northeast of Neuchâtel. The website offers more than 200 different products, a choice the company hopes to expand progressively. Information is provided in English, as well as French and German. “Only time will tell if I am to be proved right,” Biver said. “But responses have all been very positive so far. People usually tell me it is amazing that nobody had the idea before.”
For more information, consult  www.luxfood.ch