By Rodrigo Uchoa, special for Brazil Stock Guide
Continuing my stroll through Harrods in London, a small, understated jar catches the eye amid the displays of La Mer and Tatcha. Crème Ancienne, by Fresh, an LVMH brand, promises to revive “the first facial cream formula in history”.
The price tag reads £295 for 100 grams and, in suitably restrained language, explains that the recipe is “inspired by” a hand-crafted formula produced in a monastery. It does not say which monastery, who made it, or whether a monk ever came anywhere near the batch on display. But the word monastery is there, doing exactly the job it is meant to do: suggesting that the contents are ancient, artisanal and, somehow, more sacred than the jar next to it. (At this point, I should apologise in advance to any reader who objects to the irresistible monastic puns that will inevitably find their way into this article.)
The same scene plays out, with minor variations, in luxury retail temples everywhere. In California, Monastery Made, a skincare company with no religious affiliation whatsoever, founded by San Francisco aesthetician Athena Hewett, sells facial oils for more than US$180. Its branding evokes stained glass windows and contemplative silence, and the products have reportedly appeared in the washbags of Emma Stone and Emily Blunt. The story these brands are selling is simple enough: somewhere in a remote place with poor mobile reception and no Wi-Fi, there exists a community of people making things slowly, patiently, and without the slightest commercial ambition.
Some genuine monasteries have realised they can charge for that same aura. In the Casentino Forest, which separates Tuscany from Emilia-Romagna, more than a thousand metres above sea level and reached only after an hour’s winding drive from the nearest town, stands the Antica Farmacia di Camaldoli, founded by Camaldolese monks in the thirteenth century. Today, instead of supplying balms to local villagers, the monks produce anti-ageing creams, black hammam soap, green clay treatments and herbal muscle balms, all packaged in understated, almost pharmaceutical-looking containers and priced competitively with anything sold in an upmarket Milanese chemist. Further south, in the province of Parma, the Abbey of Torrechiara follows a similar formula with its Apiderma skincare line, made with honey from the monastery’s own beehives. Neither brand is stocked by Harrods, but both operate thriving online shops.
While secular brands borrow monastic imagery to sell cosmetics, real monasteries, complete with flesh-and-blood monks, vows and the Liturgy of the Hours, increasingly find themselves learning about brand management, profit margins and market demand. Through centuries of prayer and labour, some religious orders became synonymous with fine wines, spirits and beers. They now face a market reversal that is best understood in numbers.
The global alcohol market has contracted for three consecutive years. According to IWSR, the industry’s leading consultancy, total alcohol volumes fell by 2 per cent in 2025, while market value declined by 4 per cent. Wine was hit hardest, with volumes down 5 per cent, while spirits experienced a more moderate decline of 3 per cent. IWSR projects that global wine consumption will shrink by 14 per cent by 2035. During the same period, alcohol-free beer grew by 8 per cent in volume and 12 per cent in value. For the first time, “not-beer” has become the world’s second-largest beer subcategory.
Meanwhile, the global wellness economy reached a record US$6.8 trillion in 2024, growing by nearly 8 per cent in a single year and projected to reach US$9.8 trillion by 2029, comfortably outpacing global GDP growth.
For institutions whose livelihoods depend on selling centuries of liquid tradition in glass bottles, this shift poses a direct challenge. The adaptation can be seen in two very different examples, both of which capture the spirit of the age.
The first is Trappist beer, where scarcity was never part of the plan. Only eleven monasteries worldwide are authorised to use the “Authentic Trappist Product” label, which requires beer to be brewed within the abbey under monastic supervision. The problem is that there are not enough monks. Trappist orders face the same demographic challenge confronting religious vocations across the Western world: fewer entrants, ageing communities and diminishing manpower to oversee the brewing vats. St Benedict’s Abbey of Achel in Belgium lost the Trappist designation for its celebrated Achel beer because it no longer had enough monks involved in production. In the United States, St Joseph’s Abbey sent two monks to train for eight months at Scourmont Abbey in Belgium simply to launch a legitimate Trappist beer on the American market. There is a shortage of people willing to pray seven times a day and spend their spare hours monitoring fermentation.
The second example represents the opposite approach: scarcity as a deliberate business strategy, even if nobody inside the monastery would describe it that way. The Carthusian monks who produce Chartreuse, the vivid green liqueur made from 130 herbs and known from a recipe memorised by only two monks, publicly announced that they would not increase production beyond what is necessary to support their order. Output remains capped at around 1.6 million bottles a year, despite booming demand among cocktail bars around the world. Global sales rose from roughly US$20 million in 2018 to more than US$30 million in 2022. The monks insist this is not a commercial decision but a vocational one: their calling is to spend more time in prayer, not in logistics. Older bottles of Chartreuse now fetch extraordinary prices at private auctions, creating a secondary market the monks never intended to establish and from which they receive no financial benefit.
In Brazil, anyone wishing to observe this adaptive machinery on a smaller scale need not travel to Burgundy or the French Alps. A short walk to a corner of Rua Barão de Capanema, in São Paulo’s affluent Jardins district, will suffice. There stands a branch of the São Bento Monastery Bakery, opened in 2009, a decade after the monastery launched its first small shop in the city’s historic centre.
The venture by Benedictine monks into one of Brazil’s most expensive neighbourhoods has proved remarkably successful. The menu features cakes named after saints, customer service is handled through WhatsApp, the bakery’s Instagram account has nearly 60,000 followers, and it recently received a mention on a popular national television programme. Yet surviving in Jardins required the monastery to master home delivery, social media management and retail design.
The Rule of Saint Benedict, written in the sixth century, contains no guidance on marketing. The Benedictine motto, ora et labora (“pray and work”), assumes that labour should sustain prayer, rather than the other way around. Yet perhaps the clearest sign of adaptation to modern times lies in how work itself is defined. Once, it meant kneading bread and harvesting grapes. Today, it also means thinking about business models, calculating contribution margins, deciding whether to open a second location and, above all, resisting the market’s most persistent temptation: growing too quickly.
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