Bio-engineer and entrepreneur Charlotte Matthys (27) appeared in the Forbes ‘30 under 30 Europe’ in May with her company Nona. She creates non-alcoholic alternatives to spirits. ‘The recipe is secret, otherwise I cannot protect it’. 

Charlotte Matthys studied bioengineering in Ghent and, like most students, she regularly found herself in the pub on a weeknight. There, she noticed that the non-alcoholic beverage selection was rather limited. She decided to look for a solution for the lack of mature flavours and started with her favourite drink: gin. 

Together with her professors at Ghent University, she started developing a non-alcoholic alternative. She used different herbs and steam distillation to extract the taste elements from the herbs without alcohol. ‘For a non-alcoholic drink, you need more herbs to get enough flavour. It is certainly not a cheap product.’