Disruptor Olive Oil Is Everywhere—And It Reveals Something About Coffee, Too

Many internet-famous olive oil brands make marketing claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Unfortunately, coffee isn’t immune from similar disruptive tactics and pressures.

Photo by Anastasia Zhenina on Unsplash

Last night, I watched a Reel from America’s Test Kitchen that featured a group of the organization’s testers trying different olive oils.

If you’ve been on the internet recently, you’ve likely noticed a lot of newcomers to the olive oil industry; they’ve popped up across social media. They’re also in specialty stores that carry other seemingly artisanal goods (New York Magazine’s Grub Street wrote about these so-called “shoppy shops”; that article inspired me to write a piece about how consumers could possibly be expected to discern which products are “good” or “bad”).

The premise of the ATK test was pretty targeted. “For an ancient ingredient, olive oil has never been so trendy,” says Lisa McManus, the executive editor of ATK and the video’s narrator. She and the ATK team are curious whether any new olive oil disruptors can stand up to established brands. In the video, McManus does something that I think is interesting: She hones in on the marketing tactics of these newcomers. “Newer brands pop up on social media with cute names like ‘Awake’ and ‘Drizzle,’” she says. “The dark side is that newcomers often work the angle that there’s something you can’t trust about traditional olive oil.”

She’s not wrong. Graza—among the most prominent brands in the newcomer olive oil space—says this on its About page: “Most olive oil in the U.S. is blended from old, low quality oils. But across the ocean, people are using fresh, never-blended olive oil by the gallon. Graza is that olive oil. We’re made from 100% Picual olives from Jaen, Spain, the region where over half the world’s olive oil is produced.”

This positioning is incredibly interesting to me because it’s a common tactic—we see fear used all the time to influence our consumer habits or to instill distrust in the institutions around us. As my editor pointed out, this “all feels like part of the same broad ecosystem of predatory misinformation—sowing consumer distrust in the familiar and promising them something better in return.”

And it’s also common in coffee. A few weeks ago, I wrote about my concerns following the USDA’s recent decision to allow coffee to be labeled “healthy,” and how that might influence brands’ attempts to market and differentiate themselves. I worry with this mandate, people will take things further, and companies will use health to try to claim there’s something inherently untrustworthy about the coffee you’re drinking.

To some extent, this is good—we should be challenging the narratives we’re given about the things put in front of us! And if something seems fishy, we should investigate! It should be a head-scratcher that coffee farmers barely break even, and yet, many of the stories we see in the news are about coffee being too expensive. It should raise eyebrows when a coffee roaster can’t articulate what’s in their blend (I’d argue there’s nothing so necessarily proprietary about a coffee blend that’s worth keeping it a secret, but I’m not a roaster).

We should get in the habit of challenging power and questioning prevailing narratives. But what happens when those tactics are co-opted as marketing tools rather than used as genuine calls for accountability?

Making Nothing Out of Nothing

I could probably write a whole piece about the premise of “making something out of nothing”—look around and you’ll see policymakers using this tactic to scare people into believing false views of the world. I was a teaching assistant this semester, and one of the topics we discussed was Mean World Syndrome, or the idea that the world is scarier and more violent than it actually is. Views on crime are often particularly skewed between assumption (in the U.S., crime is up) and reality (crime has been going down since the 1970s).

Unsurprisingly, many of the arguments we see play out in public policy and belief systems also influence how we choose what we consume. Graza has been around since 2022, and on its website, it positions itself as better than most olive oils. Along with the claim mentioned above, the brand’s About page also features a graphic that says Graza never “blend[s] old oils down to drive costs” or “say[s] [its olives] are from Italy when they are actually from 5 different places.”

In the ATK Reel, McManus says that various marketing claims aside, the proof of olive oil’s quality lies in its taste. There’s a shot in the video where you can see testers using an evaluative tool that looks much like a coffee tasting wheel; McManus’ narration also notes that they don’t know which olive oils they’re tasting. Ultimately, the ATK team finds that few olive oil disruptor brands stand up to celebrated, longstanding favorites.

The argument that many newer olive oil entrants are making relies on questioning the quality of predecessors. While the ATK blind tasting is just one test, it does at least challenge that tenuous argument. If these disruptor brands don’t taste as good as other olive oils, and taste is a measure of quality, what does that say about their own products and how they’re made? McManus guesses that many new entrants are mixing high-quality and lower-grade oils, although notes that she can’t definitively prove that.

Like olive oil, coffee is a highly contentious industry that is constantly fighting misconceptions and working to justify its costs and processes. Those of us in the industry try repeatedly to communicate how valuable it is—that coffee should be more expensive, that being a barista is a skilled profession. Amidst this ongoing justification work, it’s easy to see why some brands rely on making simplistic or fear-based arguments for the sake of differentiation.

I don’t think these dynamics are quite as obvious in coffee as what we see with the olive oil examples above. Coffee companies aren’t yet pitting themselves against one another in the same way, or claiming that one group of brands relies on a falsehood that another set is working to dispel. But we do regularly see objective-sounding claims like “X is the best roaster,” “Y sources the best beans,” or “Z is the best brewing method”—claims that feel impossible to prove, and also just don’t really feel like arguments. There’s no way one singular roaster is best; no way one singular coffee farm is growing the best beans; no way one singular brewing method reigns supreme.

One example that does come to mind is the idea that single-origin coffees are better than blends—that’s even a claim I’m sure I’ve made at some point, and we see brands do it all the time. But nothing inherent to a single-origin coffee makes it better. Historically, the gripe was that roasters used blends to get rid of older or less valuable coffee beans, but that’s not an innate characteristic of blending itself.

I loved the ATK Reel because it used marketing messaging as a jumping-off point to analyze olive oil quality. It made me think how easy it is, as a consumer, to believe claims about certain products’ superiority—and how even using true statements (maybe it is true that most olive oils are wonky blends) can hide more than we think.

It’s all the more important to be conscious of how these claims operate—especially as they co-opt language we’ve historically used to question power and received narratives.