The NEWTREE Blog

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Written by Benoît from NEWTREE

I am often asked to tell the story of how I came up with the company name NEWTREE. With this first blog post I am very happy to share it with all those who know me personally, or those who have had a chance to taste our chocolate.

The thing is, I love forest. I also love gastronomy in general, and chocolate, in particular. Back in 2001, these two passions materialized into a business project which then became a very important part of my life, and which is now known by the name of NEWTREE.

Eight years ago, though, the company name that we registered with the public notary in Brussels was different. Its name was TreeLife, and we had already taken all the necessary administrative steps to register this name.

One day (or rather, night – I remember it was about 1 am and I was getting ready to go to sleep) I was leafing through a copy of the Belgian newspaper De Tijd. Suddenly, I saw the following, “Wessanen is acquiring Tree of Life in the USA”. Well, even though it wasn’t exactly TreeLife, I still had this funny feeling as if it was my company that was being acquired. “ Here we go,” I laughed to myself, “we’re not fully set up yet, and are already being bought!”

Clearly, that night I wasn’t going to sleep very much. Sitting in front of the computer, I searched the web to establish whether the products of TreeLife would have anything remotely in common with those of Tree of Life. Needless to say, before registering TreeLife, I had done similar research to identify any registered trademarks resembling this name, but didn’t come across Tree of Life. The result was similar this time, too – my search queries didn’t produce any results that night. Finally, the following morning, we found out that Tree of Life was a natural food wholesaler. So, both TreeLife and Tree of Life had one thing in common – food. This was enough to know in order to decide that we needed to change the name, urgently.

And here is what we did.

We launched a contest on the Internet, mostly targeted at our friends. Having set our criteria for a new name, we asked them to submit their ideas. We promised to give away a trip for two to Venice in exchange for the best chosen company name.

The next day, we were looking at a lengthy list of fun names – EpiCure, TreeO and others – submitted by contest participants from around the world. They were all quite good, but there was nothing overly inspiring either. On top of that, some of them already existed as registered trademarks, anyway.

Eventually, it was my father-in-law who helped us choose the company name. This, however, almost cost him a life! He was almost run over by a truck, and, while he managed to jump away from the fast approaching vehicle, he vaguely saw the word New painted on it. He didn’t notice the rest of the phrase, but that was enough for him to have THE name – NEWTREE.

Everybody liked this name. It was very simple, but at the same time, it pinpointed the main things which were important for our company. We thought that the sound of the word combination NEWTREE had some resemblance to the word nutrition, at least in French. We also thought that New captured our spirit of innovation, and Tree – the fact that we would give an important place to fruits, berries and natural plant essences in our products. And, yes, I can’t deny this – it also felt close to my forest-loving heart!