How an Olive Oil Lover Found Success in The US Market

Joanne Lacina did not become an olive oil lover until her mid-20s when she expe­ri­enced an epiphany on Crete.

A few years after fin­ish­ing uni­ver­sity, the Minnesota native decamped to the Mediterranean island home to about one-third of Greek olive oil pro­duc­tion.

“After col­lege, I moved back to Minneapolis and worked for a legal claims pro­cess­ing com­pany,” she told Olive Oil Times. ​“It was a great com­pany, but I wanted to do more in life than that.”

Lacina took a sec­ond job work­ing in a restau­rant, and after sav­ing enough money, she signed up to be an English teacher in Crete.

“It was just a four-week pro­gram, but I ended up stay­ing for two years,” she said. ​“I made some good friends from the pro­gram. It’s a beau­ti­ful island. Summer was com­ing. The food was amaz­ing, and I wasn’t in a hurry to leave.”

Lacina soon started work­ing for an olive oil com­pany. ​“I became very inter­ested in this deli­cious prod­uct that I was eat­ing with every meal,” she said.

The extra vir­gin olive oil Lacina tasted on the island was a far cry from the mass-mar­ket brands her mother kept in the fridge in Minnesota dur­ing the 1980s and 1990s.

“That’s all I knew of olive oil, so I was just blown away by the fla­vor,” she said, adding that the quan­ti­ties of olive oil used by the Greeks – esti­mated at 12 kilo­grams per per­son annu­ally – also came as a sur­prise.

Lacina became fur­ther entwined in the olive oil busi­ness when the com­pany enlisted her to help set up an import­ing and pack­ag­ing facil­ity in the United States.

“I was learn­ing a lot about the indus­try, but I was still very green and wanted to learn more,” she said. ​“This was just a nat­ural path to con­tinue, to come back to the U.S. and try to bring great olive oil with me.”

Lacina returned to the U.S. in 2008 and spent two years set­ting up the facil­ity, which even­tu­ally imported Greek, Spanish and Italian olive oils. ​“The goal was to pack­age for pri­vate labels and have our brands sell at retail and to food ser­vice,” she said.

Lacina soon found that dis­trib­ut­ing olive oil in the U.S. was far dif­fer­ent from doing so in Europe. ​“It was quite a learn­ing curve,” she said. ​“The U.S. does not oper­ate in the same way as European super­mar­ket chains and dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels.”

Lacina quickly found that super­mar­kets and restau­rants were more inter­ested in find­ing the best price point than dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing olive oils by their organolep­tic pro­files.

“Launching a brand in the U.S. is a very costly and risky endeavor,” she said. ​“It was true then, and it’s true today. That’s just the real­ity.”

While Lacina was try­ing to estab­lish the company’s U.S. foot­print, she trav­eled to food shows world­wide, meet­ing pro­duc­ers and try­ing their extra vir­gin olive oils.

“By this point, I knew that the super­mar­ket chan­nel was not going to be the best route for many of these brands, espe­cially smaller com­pa­nies,” she said. ​“They have small bud­gets and expen­sive oper­a­tions. These are not cheap every­day oils. They are beau­ti­ful, spe­cial prod­ucts, and they cost a bit more.”

Lacina real­ized that super­mar­ket shelves, where a bot­tle of high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil can spend three months before it is pur­chased, were not the best place to show­case these brands.

At the time, e‑commerce was becom­ing increas­ingly com­mon­place. Lacina and her part­ners decided to set up a web­site ded­i­cated to sell­ing olive oil.

“In 2010, this idea came to fruition, so I set forth on a two-year project sourc­ing oils, going to trade shows, meet­ing pro­duc­ers that I had come to know, and going on har­vest tours in Spain, Greece and Italy,” she said.

By 2012, Lacina founded Olive Oil Lovers. ​“And here we are nearly fif­teen years after the idea came into my head, and, yes, peo­ple absolutely buy olive oil online.”

However, bring­ing olive oil from small-scale, high-qual­ity pro­duc­ers across the Mediterranean to con­sumers’ doorsteps in the U.S. remains com­pli­cated.

By December or January each year, Lacina starts order­ing oils using com­pany ana­lyt­ics that show sales trends and prod­uct sales his­to­ries.

Over the years, she has become adept at iden­ti­fy­ing trendy pro­duc­ers with strong sales growth and has kept those oils well-stocked for her cus­tomers.

“Ordering is always a fun, com­plex time,” she said. ​“I spend about one month at the begin­ning of the har­vest sea­son work­ing long hours to order all these prod­ucts myself. Then I play Tetris, putting together beau­ti­ful pal­lets of all the prod­ucts I order.”

These pal­lets are then gath­ered in the ware­houses of local con­sol­ida­tors in Greece, Italy and Spain before being packed into ship­ping con­tain­ers and sent to New York.

Lacina does not worry too much about the extra vir­gin olive oils being shipped at cool enough tem­per­a­tures since the Northern Hemisphere’s har­vest takes place in the autumn, and the con­tain­ers nav­i­gate the North Atlantic in the win­ter.

Once the ship­ping con­tain­ers arrive in New York, they are sent to the company’s ware­house 20 min­utes away and stored in cool, dark con­di­tions year-round until they are pur­chased by a cus­tomer and shipped to their door.

Over the past decade and a half, Lacina has seen a trans­for­ma­tion in the olive oil world. Initially, she said it was rare to find com­pa­nies har­vest­ing olives early to pri­or­i­tize intense fla­vors and supe­rior qual­ity over quan­tity.

Now, the trend has caught on. ​“Today, there are far too many pro­duc­ers than I could ever rep­re­sent, but that’s a great thing,” she said.

Along with qual­ity, Lacina has seen a rev­o­lu­tion in pack­ag­ing. She believes that how olive oil is pre­sented is very impor­tant to con­sumers. While pack­ag­ing must be func­tional, beau­ti­fully labeled bot­tles help catch con­sumers’ atten­tion.

In 2023, the United States over­took Spain and became the world’s sec­ond-largest olive oil con­sumer. Lacina said she has seen a change in pref­er­ence for larger for­mats as more Americans use more olive oil.

“The bag-in-box is becom­ing more trendy,” she said. ​“Our cus­tomers appre­ci­ate larger for­mats. They’re more cost-effec­tive. They want a five-liter bag-in-box in the kitchen that keeps the oil fresh. If you go through a lot of oil, it’s a great option.”

In recent years, Lacina has also seen increased demand for olive oil with high lev­els of polyphe­nols from con­sumers and home­o­pathic med­ical offices. ​“A big sell­ing point is, of course, the health fac­tor,” she con­firmed.

America’s grow­ing appetite for extra vir­gin olive oil has also led Lacina to look for new fla­vors and cul­ti­vars to offer her con­sumers. ​“As much as I love Picual, Koroneiki and Arbequina, there are a lot of those oils out there,” she said. ​“I’m look­ing for some­thing unique.”

Lacina believes the rise in tourism to the Mediterranean over the past few decades has helped increase olive oil con­sump­tion back home and exposed con­sumers to a more diverse range of olive oils.

“They try a really good oil for the first time, and it just opens their mind,” she said. ​“Then, it’s really hard to return to a generic, cheaper oil that does­n’t taste great. That’s why I think con­sump­tion will con­tinue to grow in the U.S.”

While she agrees that the U.S. could soon over­take Italy and become the world’s largest olive oil con­sumer, Lacina says there is no sin­gle trend that U.S. con­sumers are fol­low­ing. ​“Customers love all kinds of things,” she said. Everyone’s palate is dif­fer­ent.”