For Some Olive Oils, Wind-Powered Cargo Adds New Appeal

Summary

Grain de Sail recently unloaded French and Italian olive oils in New York, trans­ported across the Atlantic by wind alone, mark­ing a shift in how olive oil is trans­ported and per­ceived. The com­pany is expand­ing its sail-pow­ered ship­ping oper­a­tion to include more high-qual­ity food prod­ucts, aim­ing to con­nect with con­sumers through sus­tain­abil­ity and reduce envi­ron­men­tal impact.

A sail­ing cargo ves­sel recently unloaded French and Italian olive oils in New York, car­ry­ing them across the Atlantic by wind alone. Operated by French com­pany Grain de Sail, the ship­ment points to a quiet but sig­nif­i­cant shift not only in how olive oil is trans­ported, but also in how it is posi­tioned and per­ceived, as logis­tics itself becomes part of the product’s story.

More ves­sels are now cross­ing the Atlantic under sail with pal­lets of high-qual­ity food, offer­ing a low-impact mode of trans­port that could reshape how con­sumers value some olive oils.

“We did not invent it,” Tanguy Passini, oper­a­tions and sales man­ager at Grain de Sail, told Olive Oil Times. ​“If you think about it, sail­ing cargo boats have been there since the begin­ning of nav­i­ga­tion. What we did is put into it mod­ern cri­te­ria, advanced ship design, tech­nol­ogy and a lot of pas­sion.”

Grain de Sail has oper­ated in the North Atlantic for years, trans­port­ing raw mate­ri­als such as green cof­fee beans and cocoa paste from Central America to France, ini­tially for its own pro­duc­tion, while export­ing fin­ished prod­ucts to the United States. High-qual­ity olive oil is the lat­est addi­tion to that busi­ness.

The lat­est ship­ment grew out of the French activ­i­ties of Dan Beekley, a long­time U.S. wine importer. ​“My life­time career has been in wine,” Beekley told Olive Oil Times. ​“A lot of it hap­pens behind the scenes. Most cus­tomers would have no idea how often a bot­tle or a box of wine moves around. It is shock­ing, actu­ally.”

Beekley said his view changed fur­ther after enter­ing the world of olive oil. ​“I did the Olive Oil Sommelier Certification Program orga­nized by Olive Oil Times in London a cou­ple of years ago, which was sort of an eye opener,” he said. ​“I was real­iz­ing there is a lot more to this world than I would have imag­ined.”

After decades of rely­ing on con­ven­tional ship­ping, he said he became increas­ingly crit­i­cal of its envi­ron­men­tal cost. Olive oil, in his view, offered a chance to shorten the dis­tance between pro­duc­ers and con­sumers and to align his busi­ness with his per­sonal val­ues.

For his first ship­ment to New York, Beekley selected oils from a small group of pro­duc­ers he knows per­son­ally. He and his wife trav­eled through France and south­ern Italy to meet them and taste their oils, later pur­chas­ing small quan­ti­ties for sale in Europe and the United States.

Among them is Francesco Mastrangelo, founder of Trespaldum, an olive mill in Italy​’s Molise region. The com­pany has spent more than a decade pro­duc­ing high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oils. Its flag­ship is a Gentile di Mafalda monocul­ti­var made from a vari­ety Mastrangelo him­self iden­ti­fied and reg­is­tered in 2017.

“I have always processed olives with zero impact,” Mastrangelo said, point­ing to invest­ments in solar energy, bio­mass heat­ing and cir­cu­lar waste use. ​“Nothing is thrown away. Everything we pro­duce is reused within the sys­tem.”

When Beekley pro­posed ship­ping olive oil across the Atlantic by sail, Mastrangelo said he embraced the idea imme­di­ately. ​“We pro­duce olive oil with­out pol­lut­ing, and then we trans­port it to America with­out pol­lut­ing, in such a sus­tain­able way,” he said. ​“It gives you chills.”

Shared val­ues also drew Rosa and Giorgio Bianchini, pro­duc­ers in the cen­tral Italian region of Latium, into the project. ​“We select our part­ners based on sus­tain­abil­ity and envi­ron­men­tal val­ues,” Rosa Bianchini told Olive Oil Times. ​“When we met Beekley we imme­di­ately saw we could part­ner with his idea. The project reflects exactly our mind­set.”

Both engi­neers, the Bianchinis com­bine tra­di­tional farm­ing with data-dri­ven deci­sion-mak­ing. They use weather sta­tions and other tools to bet­ter inter­pret con­di­tions in their groves. That same approach led them to intro­duce a ther­mochromic label that changes when stor­age tem­per­a­tures exceed 20 degrees Celsius, then returns to nor­mal when con­di­tions improve.

Bianchini said the label was designed both to raise aware­ness and to help con­sumers pre­serve olive oil cor­rectly at home.

Production at the estate remains inten­tion­ally small, at around 50 – 60 quin­tals per year, with a focus on qual­ity rather than scale. Bianchini said sail-pow­ered ship­ping is unlikely to drive large vol­umes, but it offers some­thing else: posi­tion­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and a way to con­nect with con­sumers, espe­cially younger ones, through sus­tain­abil­ity.

Beekley said he expects the project to grow to at least ten pro­ducer part­ners by the end of the year. ​“In the next three months we will intro­duce two more, one from Portugal and one from Italy,” he said. ​“If I get to ten sup­pli­ers, I think I can have sup­pli­ers that I can lean on every year and also have a hand­ful that I know I can pick up every time a sail­boat moves.”

Grain de Sail’s fleet crosses the Atlantic from Saint-Malo, in Brittany. The com­pany now oper­ates two pur­pose-built ves­sels. Grain de Sail One entered ser­vice in 2020, while Grain de Sail Two began oper­a­tions in 2024 and can carry roughly 350 tons of goods, about ten times the capac­ity of the first ves­sel.

The com­pany is now build­ing a third and much larger sail-pow­ered cargo ship, this time a con­tainer ves­sel, with the aim of reduc­ing trans­port costs through greater scale.

Passini said the company’s choice of smaller ports is part of the model. Saint-Malo helps avoid con­ges­tion at major European hubs such as Le Havre and Rotterdam, while a small port in New Jersey reduces lead time around New York by speed­ing load­ing, unload­ing and local han­dling.

Weather, often seen as the main obsta­cle to sail freight, is instead treated as a man­age­able vari­able. Passini said the cross­ing typ­i­cally takes 20 to 24 days, with aver­age delays of about 2 days per year.

Unlike con­ven­tional freighters, which often fol­low near-straight routes, sail­ing cargo ves­sels move accord­ing to the logic of wind. Their tracks across the Atlantic can look erratic, but Passini said they are highly pre­cise, trac­ing a new kind of route between pro­duc­ers and con­sumers.