It’s Alive Bakery in St. Lucia is not a place I recommend for real vegans, and especially not for people looking for vegan food in St. Lucia, whole food plant based food, or ital food. Sadly, in my experience, it is still the best St. Lucia has when it comes to fresh food.
Both of those sentences are true for me. That is what this review is really about.
This is my review of the food, the bakery, the kombucha and the atmosphere, from my own visit to the shop in Rodney Bay. The menu, the prices, Denia Krone, Dario Piazza and the ratings come from the bakery’s website, its Instagram, its menu board and its public reviews, and I link them so you can check me.
What is It’s Alive Bakery in St. Lucia?
It’s Alive Bakery and Fermentory is a plant based sourdough bakery and kombucha brewery in Rodney Bay, St. Lucia.
It’s Alive sits at the Bonne Terre Commercial Centre in Rodney Bay, Gros Islet, at the north end of St. Lucia. On its own website it calls itself the island’s first and only plant based sourdough bakery and fermentory, with no dairy, eggs or meat, and food it describes as cultured and fermented.
Denia Krone and Dario Piazza own It’s Alive. The bakery’s own story calls her Danni, and it calls the couple Danni and Dario Piazza. The Caribbean Lifestyle podcast names the founders Denia Krone and Dario Piazza. The same About page credits the logo to Denia DuBoulay. Denia and Dario spent about eighteen months abroad studying organic farming and food systems in Brazil, Portugal and Spain, returned in 2018, and began baking sourdough and bottling kombucha by hand on family land at Cas En Bas. They registered the company and bought their first oven in 2020, opened at The Dream in 2022, moved into a bigger space at Johnsons Centre in 2024, and in 2026 the kombucha was on shelves through Massy Stores and a long list of other shops.
Denia and Dario grew a bakery from a family kitchen to a supermarket shelf in six years. I respect that work. This isn’t personal. My problem is with the food, and with the word vegan doing more work than it should.
Denia Krone and Dario Piazza are not presented as vegan. On its own site It’s Alive calls itself a plant based company, and the Caribbean Lifestyle podcast with Denia Krone and Dario Piazza is a conversation about the difference between plant based and vegan. A vegan atmosphere comes from people who live it. This one is cookies, sweetened kombucha and processed spreads.
| What you want to know | What we found | Source |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A plant based sourdough bakery and kombucha brewery. The website says no dairy, eggs or meat. The feed also sells honey | It’s Alive website |
| Where it is | Bonne Terre Commercial Centre, San-La-We Drive, Rodney Bay, Gros Islet | Google Maps |
| Who runs it | Denia Krone, called Danni on the About page, and Dario Piazza | About page, podcast |
| Opening hours | Monday to Saturday, 7.30am to 5.30pm. Closed on Sunday | website, Google |
| Prices | Sandwiches EC$18, baguette EC$8, small kombucha EC$5 | Menu board, November 2025 |
| Paying | Cards accepted | Menu board |
| Eating in | Takeaway, with outdoor seating | HappyCow |
| Ratings | Google 4.7 (91), TripAdvisor 3.4 (5), HappyCow 5.0 (13) | Checked 5 November 2026 |
| Where the flour comes from | Not stated anywhere we could find | Website, Instagram, menu |
| Organic or local claims | Coconut, named on Instagram. The flour, the cashews and the Lavazza coffee are still unnamed | Instagram, October 2026, and the website |
What did I eat at It’s Alive?
It’s Alive served me the Biome and a Healthy Kombucha, and never handed over the baguette I had paid for.
I ordered the Biome, a Healthy Kombucha and a plain baguette, all to go.
They never gave me the baguette. I had paid for it. I didn’t bother reminding them, because by then it wasn’t worth it.
My overview of the food is one word. Bad.
My stomach hurt after the few bites I took.
And the baguette I paid for and never left with? If I had taken it home I would have given it to the dogs, and even then I’d have worried about their stomachs.
This is one visit, one sandwich and one drink, and my own stomach’s reply. I can’t tell you what made it hurt, and I won’t pretend to. What I can tell you is what was in it.
What is in the Biome sandwich at It’s Alive?
The Biome at It’s Alive is BBQ tempeh, herbed cashew cheese and gingery red sauerkraut on sourdough, and the vegetables are the garnish.
The board calls the Biome bold and tangy. That list is from the chalkboard in the shop, photographed by a customer on Google Maps in August 2026. You choose a sourdough baguette, a sourdough bun or a gluten free sourdough bun. The printed menu from November 2025 prices it at EC$18.
The vegetables are the garnish. Lift them off and the thing you paid for is processed soy, a spread of cashews, fermented cabbage, and bread. It is the sandwich people already eat, with the cheese and the meat swapped for plants. Someone who is not vegan would love it, because it is the food they are used to.
The flavour on top of all of it is fermentation. Tempeh is fermented soy. The cheese is cultured. The cabbage is fermented. The dough is a long ferment, and baking kills the live cultures in the loaf, so the bread is not the same as the kraut. The drink beside it was fermented tea. Fermentation can be a craft. Here it is the whole taste, and still not a meal.
What is in the cashew cheese at It’s Alive?
The cashew cheese at It’s Alive is made from cashews, and a raw cashew sits in a shell of caustic oil, in the same family as poison ivy. Shell it by hand and the oil burns the skin. In 2011 Human Rights Watch documented people held in drug detention centres in Vietnam who were forced to shell cashews, and the fluid burned their hands. I have posted about those burns until the comments filled with people who had never been told, including on the reel about the cashew. One of you wrote the line that thousands of people liked.
“Our vegan milk and vegan cheesecake doesn’t need other human to be enslaved or to be burned.”
I am not saying It’s Alive bought those cashews. I don’t know where these nuts were grown, and I don’t know if they were local. Cashew trees do grow in the Caribbean. A cashew cheese on a Rodney Bay menu does not tell you which tree, which country, or whose hands. Vegan tells you an animal was not in the cheese. It tells you nothing about the person who shelled the nut.
Is the rest of the It’s Alive sandwich organic?
It’s Alive does not say the Biome garnish or the tempeh is organic. The lettuce, the onion, the cucumber, the cabbage in the kraut and the soy in the tempeh have the same hole. Unless those plants are organic, they were grown with pesticides. The board does not say organic. St. Lucia used 27.59 kilograms of pesticide per hectare of cropland in the 2023 FAO figures, more than eleven times the world average of 2.40 (FAO via Our World in Data). If any of that garnish was grown on this island and it was not organic, that spray is in the bite. If it was imported, you have swapped one unknown spray for another. I am not pointing at a field behind this bakery. The ordinary supply here is a sprayed supply, and a menu that will not say organic is asking you to eat the ordinary.
Then the bread. Where It’s Alive publishes a sourdough ingredient list, the baguette is white wheat flour and wheat flour, with their culture, salt and water. White flour is what remains after the bran and the germ are taken off. A long ferment can make it gentler than a cheap white loaf. It does not make it a vegetable. St. Lucia imports all of its cereals, so the wheat in that baguette came off a ship. The bakery does not say which country, whether the wheat was sprayed, or whether the flour is whole. White flour, no origin, no organic claim. That is a highly likely picture of the loaf. I have not opened the sack. I am not saying the flour is genetically modified. The bakery does not say, so that claim stays off this review.
Is the Healthy Kombucha at It’s Alive healthy?
The Healthy Kombucha at It’s Alive is Herbal Health, a fermented sweet tea, and the health evidence is thin.
I ordered it as the Healthy Kombucha. The closest name on the November 2025 menu is Herbal Health, sold as an elixir at EC$8 or EC$16. The other kombucha flavours on that board are EC$5 for a small bottle and EC$12 for a large one.
Kombucha is tea fermented with sugar and a culture of bacteria and yeast. The health claims are ahead of the evidence. A 2024 trial in 59 adults, and a 2026 report from the same programme, found no significant difference between groups on the markers they measured. None of that is a result for this bottle. It is fermented sweet tea, with sugar in it. Enjoy it if you like it. Don’t let the word probiotic, or the word healthy on the board, do the thinking.
Have other customers had order problems at It’s Alive?
Other customers at It’s Alive have left without the order they paid for, and Denia Krone and Dario Piazza reply to reviews.
Other customers have had problems with their orders, so I was not the only one who left without what I paid for. On Google, one reviewer ordered a Three Amigos with tempeh and got black beans, no chickpea egg and the wrong bread. Another called to ask when to collect a cake she had ordered and was asked which cake. On TripAdvisor, a reviewer wrote in October 2025 that a confirmed custom cake never arrived.
Another TripAdvisor reviewer wrote in December 2025 that two family members with coeliac disease became ill after eating the gluten free buns and cookies, and that the owners denied there was a problem. That is one family’s account and I can’t verify it. An earlier reviewer, in 2024, praised the same gluten free bun and the care the staff took over cross contamination. If you are coeliac, you deserve to hear both. The owners do answer. They replied to the sandwich complaint with humour and to the cake complaint with an apology. Most of the reviews are warm, and plenty of people love the cookies, the carrot cake and the iced coffee.
How much does It’s Alive cost?
A sandwich at It’s Alive costs EC$18, a baguette costs EC$8, and a small kombucha costs EC$5.
Those prices are from the printed menu photographed in the shop in November 2025. A baguette is also three for EC$20. Prices are in Eastern Caribbean dollars with VAT included. The EC dollar has been fixed at EC$2.70 to the US dollar since 1976 (Eastern Caribbean dollar), so a sandwich is about US$6.70.
| On the menu | Price in EC$ | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Baguette | 8 each, or 3 for 20 | Sourdough |
| Country loaf | 15 | Sourdough loaf |
| Savoury bun, sesame bun | 5 each | Sourdough buns |
| Gluten free bun | 6 | Gluten free sourdough |
| Three Amigos, Creamy Veggie Pesto, The Biome, Hummus Krunch | 18 each | Sandwiches on baguette, bun or gluten free bun |
| Toffee nut, wild gingerbread and gluten free snickerdoodle cookies | 7 each | Sourdough cookies |
| Chocolate chunk cookie | 8 | Sourdough cookie, a bestseller |
| Cinnayum roll | 8.50, or 2 for 15 | Sourdough pastry |
| Lemon chia, carrot cake and banana mocha muffins | 6 each | Sourdough muffins |
| Kombucha, six flavours | 5 small, 12 large | Fermented sweetened tea |
| Herbal Health elixir | 8 or 16 | The closest match to the Healthy Kombucha I ordered |
| Kraut Gut Shot | 40 for 750ml | Fermented vegetable juice |
| Gingery red sauerkraut | 25 for 365g | Fermented cabbage |
| Baby blue and roasted garlic cashew cheese | 35 for 180g | Cashew based cheese |
| Coconut yoghurt | 15 for 300g | Vanilla or plain |
| Carib coffee, matcha, tea | 10 to 15 | Chilled drinks |
| Protein smoothie | 20 | Chilled drink |
Prices change, so check the board when you go. Read the list for what is missing. Bread, cookies, pastries, muffins, sweetened drinks and processed spreads. There is not one plate of vegetables, beans or ground provisions on it.
How is It’s Alive rated?
It’s Alive is rated 4.7 on Google, 3.4 on TripAdvisor and 5.0 on HappyCow, as of 5 November 2026.
The people who love It’s Alive love the treats. The complaints are about orders and service. HappyCow files the bakery with vegan food in St. Lucia, which is where a search for vegan restaurants in St. Lucia ends up.
| Platform | Rating | Reviews | What people praise | What people complain about |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4.7 out of 5 | 91 | Cookies, sourdough bread, carrot cake, coconut yoghurt, mango kombucha | Wrong or forgotten orders, unfriendly service, prices | |
| TripAdvisor | 3.4 out of 5 | 5, TripAdvisor lists the bakery in Rodney Bay. I am not repeating a restaurant ranking I could not confirm | Gluten free and dairy free cakes and bread | A custom cake that never came, a coeliac family who became ill |
| HappyCow | 5.0 out of 5 | 13 | Sandwiches, baguettes, cookies, kombucha, iced coffee | Old opening hours and an old location |
Ratings tell you whether people enjoyed it. They don’t tell you what it did to the soil, the farmer or your gut. It’s Alive still serves food and an atmosphere at the level of this sandwich. That should tell you something about the standard on the island. When the bar is that low, a vegan word on a sandwich feels like health, because the thing people compare it with is worse.
There is a real profit in being the vegan space in a country whose food is this toxic. People want somewhere they can point to. When almost everything else is imported, sprayed, or both, the shop that says plant based can charge for the relief. I understand the business. The irony is that It’s Alive does not live up to the standard it is selling. The menu is the food people who are not vegan already recognise. The word does the selling. The plate does not do the work.
What does the It’s Alive Instagram show that the website does not?
The It’s Alive Instagram names the coconut and sells honey, and the website does not list the jar.
I read @itsaliveslu on 10 November 2026. The bio says they help food lovers enjoy sourdough, kombucha and ferments that make gut health easy. Two posts are worth your time. They can name a local ingredient when they want the credit, and they can put a famous name on a cup and stop there.
The coconut post is the one place they get specific. On 12 October they wrote that they take a scale to a vendor, pay per gram, clean the coconut until it is white, and turn it into coconut yoghurt or coconut bacon. They call themselves the only business on the island offering those two to a plant based community. They can name a local ingredient when they want the credit. They do not do it for the wheat, and they do not do it for the cashew. The coffee is the same silence with a famous name on it.
What is in the Lavazza cup at It’s Alive?
The Lavazza cup at It’s Alive is iced coffee in a plastic cup with house made coconut milk, and the post does not name the blend, the country or an organic bag.
The coffee post thanks Lavazza for the beans. The photo is an iced coffee in a plastic cup. The sticker says Carib Coffee, Italian coffee, with their house made coconut milk. It does not say which blend, which country the coffee grew in, whether it was organic, or the day it was roasted.
Lavazza does have an organic coffee. The range is called Tierra, and on that page Lavazza calls it a bio organic range, including a blend of 100 percent organic arabica. If this bag is Tierra, say so. The post does not. Ask them which one it is. Until the bag is named, the highly likely cup is the ordinary blend: coffee from the tropical belt, mixed until the farm disappears, grown in the sprayed system, and sold as Italian. I have not opened the bag.
Then the journey. The cherry is picked in the coffee belt, shipped to a Lavazza plant in Europe or North America, roasted, sealed in a barrier bag of plastic and foil because air stales a roast, and shipped again. Lavazza’s own 2024 report calls 81 percent of its packaging recyclable, and says green coffee is highly sensitive to climate change. A recyclable bag is still a plastic bag that sits through a sea voyage and a storeroom before anyone in Rodney Bay grinds it. Time in that bag is how an old roast stays saleable. Every extra voyage is fuel. Growing the bean in the tropics, roasting it far away, and drinking it here is three climates for one cup.
St Lucia used to grow coffee, and the land still can. The Ministry of Agriculture’s 2016 to 2021 plan says what is left is less than 25 acres, mostly trees more than 50 years old, and local purchases of fresh beans fell from about 396 kilograms in 2000 to 18 kilograms in 2013. The crop was left. The rest of the island’s own industry is on the Throne Eco Index for St Lucia. The country scores 60 out of 100, and food and farming scores 1 out of 5. Farming is 1.7 percent of the economy. The food import bill was EC$564 million in 2024. In 2025 St Lucia earned EC$81.4 million from what it made and spent EC$2.46 billion bringing things in. Bananas earned EC$3.0 million. A cafe pouring an unnamed European roast is choosing that import dock. The scores, and the longer record, are in the My Ideal World app.
If locally grown coffee, the climate, and wellbeing were really the concern, the cup would start in this sea. The Dominican Republic still lists coffee among the crops it exports, and it is the largest coffee grower in the Caribbean, more than 400,000 bags a year, almost all arabica, a short crossing from here. St Lucia still has a little of its own. Noble Tree in Micoud says it buys from local farmers and roasts to order. Micoud to Rodney Bay is a road. A Lavazza bag is an ocean, and a second ocean if the cherry was picked in the Americas and roasted in Europe, and then a shelf. A cup that cared about the miles, the fuel, the plastic and the climate would name the tree and the day it was roasted. This one names a brand. Strong and rich is a cafe. It is not health, and it is not wellness.
I checked the website and the product list for honey and did not find the jar there. The feed is different. On 16 September 2026 they posted the jars. The lids say Piazza Acres, pure and raw, wild floral, 375 grams. The card in the photo says raw honey from our Cas En Bas hives, $40, and 380ml. The caption says 375 grams for EC$40, a limited amount, taken overseas to be tasted, with people calling it the best honey they had ever had and a tropical taste, and to ask Gaz Oakley. I saved the screenshot. If they delete the post, the claim is still here. Honey is not vegan. Bees make it, and selling it is selling an animal product. The website says no animal products, and then it names dairy, eggs and meat. Honey is the animal product left off that sentence and put on the feed. A shop that sells the jar cannot also be a vegan shop.
A vegan word on iced coffee, charcoal kombucha and a sandwich of white flour is still misleading. The definition of the word has not changed, and it is the next thing worth knowing.
What is the difference between vegan, whole food plant based and ital?
Vegan bars animal products, whole food plant based also bars white flour and sugar, and ital keeps food close to the earth.
What does vegan mean?
Vegan means no animal products and no animal exploitation, and nothing more. The Vegan Society, founded in 1944, defines veganism as a way of living that seeks to exclude all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals as far as is possible and practicable.
Nothing in that definition is about your body. White flour is vegan. Sugar is vegan. Coconut oil, protein isolates, non dairy creamer and a bag of crisps are all vegan. One Google reviewer asked for an espresso with a little hot milk at It’s Alive and was given hot non dairy creamer. Vegan, yes. Whole food, no.
What is whole food plant based?
Whole food plant based means eating plants as close as possible to how they grew, with as little processing as possible. The T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies, a nonprofit in North Carolina, lists white flour, refined sugar, added oils, even olive and coconut, and ultra processed foods as foods to avoid, alongside meat, dairy and eggs.
By that standard, a sourdough baguette, a cookie and a sweetened tea are treats, not food you build a day on. Coconut bacon and cashew cheese are processed products made from plants. They can be lovely. They are not whole food.
What is ital food?
Ital food is the Rastafari way of eating, and the word comes from vital with the first letter dropped. It grew in Jamaica. Ital avoids chemicals, additives, colours and preservatives. Many ital cooks leave out salt, and the strictest avoid food grown with pesticides or fertilisers and cook only in clay and wood. The point is livity, the life force in the food and in you.
This is the Caribbean’s own standard, and it asks far more of a kitchen than vegan does. A kitchen that buys in flour, sugar and processed spreads can be fully vegan and nowhere near ital. I wrote about a chef who cooks it properly in an ex Michelin chef cooking ital dinners from a bungalow in Antigua.
| Question | Vegan | Whole food plant based | Ital | It’s Alive, from its own menu |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Animal products? | None | None | None for most, some eat fish | None on the menu. The Instagram sold honey |
| White flour and refined sugar? | Allowed | Avoided | Processed food and additives avoided | Sourdough breads, cookies, pastries and kombucha brewed with sugar |
| Processed plant products? | Allowed | Avoided | Avoided | Coconut bacon, cashew cheese, chickpea egg, BBQ tempeh |
| Grown without chemicals? | Not required | Not required | Required by the strictest | Not stated |
| Where the ingredients come from? | Not required | Not required | Close to home and the earth | Not stated |
What does real vegan food look like next to It’s Alive?
Casa de Luz, Ummy and Mount Kailash match a plant based claim, and It’s Alive in St. Lucia does not.
The standard is whether the plate, the ingredients and the room match the claim.
Casa de Luz in Austin has been setting a table, in some form, for 40 years. It is a nonprofit community wellness center. I sat with Eduardo Longoria, who goes by Wayo, and you do not choose the food. You sit down and eat what the kitchen cooked, with whoever is already there. He told me why he was willing to talk about it at all. “My hope in talking to you about it is to inspire others to create places like this in their hometown.”
Ummy is Mariam’s raw vegan cafe in Tbilisi. In the film she says the name is the Georgian word for raw, and that the restaurant is fully raw. Her line for what that means is simple. “Here we do not destroy food.” She also says the quality of the product determines what is the dish itself.
Mount Kailash is the one on this island. When I went up in October 2026, the plate was picked that day. A coconut rundown, the coconut milk squeezed by hand, basil, garden tomato and breadfruit. A salad of lettuce, shine bush and cucumber. You can see the food growing before it is cooked. It’s Alive is a treat shop.
Is It’s Alive the best vegan food in St. Lucia?
It’s Alive can feel like the best fresh food in St. Lucia because a loaf baked that morning beats packaged imports, and the bar is that low.
On the Throne Eco Index for St Lucia, food and farming scores 1 out of 5. Being better than a sprayed import aisle is not the same as being good.
If you are in Rodney Bay and you want a cookie and a coffee, It’s Alive is there. Eat it as a treat. If you came to St. Lucia to eat well, don’t build your days on it. Castries Market, early on a Saturday, is where you buy from the person who grew the food. Ask where it grew and whether it was sprayed.
And if you run It’s Alive and you want to tell me where the flour and the cashews come from, and whether the coffee is Tierra, I will add your answer here.
Thanks for reading! @queenofvitality