Meet the Retailers Working to Grow Oleotourism Sales After the Vacation Ends

Two years of poor har­vests across the Mediterranean, soar­ing pro­duc­tion costs and a global cost of liv­ing cri­sis have squeezed the mar­gins of many of the world’s small-scale olive oil pro­duc­ers.

These farm­ers and millers are seen as the guardians of local olive oil tra­di­tions and cul­ti­vars, so find­ing alter­na­tive rev­enue streams to keep their oper­a­tions prof­itable is crit­i­cal to the suc­cess and health of the wider sec­tor. (Deoleo chief exec­u­tive Ignacio Silva cer­tainly thinks so.)

While sell­ing car­bon cred­its and olive oil pro­duc­tion waste prod­ucts are among the ideas fre­quently floated at con­fer­ences and indus­try asso­ci­a­tion gath­er­ings, tourism remains a sig­nif­i­cant source of rev­enue for pro­duc­ers, many of whose groves are located amid spec­tac­u­lar scenery.

However, Alicia and Vijay Shroff, co-own­ers of the St Louis, Missouri-based spe­cialty store Extra Virgin an Olive Ovation, have iden­ti­fied a prob­lem many inter­na­tional vis­i­tors to Mediterranean olive groves expe­ri­ence and are work­ing on a solu­tion.

“The prob­lem that I sus­pect most oleo­tourism pro­duc­ers have is what I call the ​‘checked bag­gage prob­lem,’” Vijay said. ​“When you’re abroad, you prob­a­bly don’t want to come home with mul­ti­ple bot­tles of olive oil in your checked bag, which lim­its the sales for the pro­duc­ers on site to one or two bot­tles.”

The Shroffs encoun­tered this issue when vis­it­ing the groves and mill of Andalusia-based Basilippo. Unlike many oleo­tourism enthu­si­asts, how­ever, they were well placed as wine, extra vir­gin olive oil and spe­cialty food retail­ers to solve the issue.

“We will be their sales ful­fill­ment out­fit for their American vis­i­tors,” Vijay said. ​“That accom­plishes a lot of things. It solves the check bag­gage issue, and it should solve the ship­ping cost issue.”

“It’s a lot more effi­cient to import by the pal­let and then use domes­tic ful­fill­ment ser­vices [to reach the end cus­tomer] than for some­one to ship six bot­tles from south­ern Spain to their home,” he added.

Along with low­er­ing pro­duc­tion costs, the Shroffs believe that this method bet­ter pre­serves the qual­ity of the extra vir­gin olive oil. They use their well-estab­lished logis­tics route instead of con­sumers hop­ing that ful­fill­ment ser­vices use cli­mate-con­trolled ship­ping con­tain­ers and ware­houses.

“It’s a win for the cus­tomers, too, because they can stay engaged post-vaca­tion with the pro­ducer,” Vijay said. ​“Now, they have a domes­tic source of the new har­vest or dif­fer­ent vari­etal that might be released.”

Citing the company’s anec­do­tal expe­ri­ence, Alicia said she sees a strong ten­dency for cus­tomers to seek out extra vir­gin olive oil brands from places they have vis­ited and forged a strong con­nec­tion.

“We do see pretty strong resale, so cus­tomers com­ing back for the new har­vest, look­ing for their favorite pro­ducer,” she said. ​“Basilippo has devel­oped quite a fol­low­ing in the U.S. because of that.”

Along with con­nect­ing vaca­tion­ers to their favorite pro­duc­ers after their trip, Alicia said she believes forg­ing these rela­tion­ships between spe­cialty shops and pro­duc­ers cre­ates a sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship for both par­ties.

While the spe­cialty shop own­ers receive an eclec­tic array of extra vir­gin olive oils from lesser-known vari­eties and regions, allow­ing them to stand out from the typ­i­cal offer­ing of gro­cery store chains, pro­duc­ers will ben­e­fit from their cus­tomer data­bases and mar­ket­ing efforts.

“When the new har­vest comes out, we’ll email every­body who’s bought your olive oils in the past to try to encour­age those kinds of trans­ac­tions,” Alicia said.

“In addi­tion to the import­ing and the cus­toms and ful­fill­ment, there’s also a mar­ket­ing piece that I think many pro­duc­ers out­side the U.S. strug­gle with,” she added.

One of the main chal­lenges that Alicia and Vijay face in bring­ing their project to fruition is cre­at­ing rela­tion­ships with pro­duc­ers invested in oleo­tourism to get their olive oils to the U.S. and sell them to for­mer vis­i­tors and new cus­tomers.

“As much as I’d like to be on per­ma­nent olive grove vaca­tion, I can’t,” Vijay said. ​“We’ve found that a lot of these peo­ple get to these groves via tour com­pa­nies, so it’s not always the case that they’re eas­ily found.”

Since launch­ing their web­site and begin­ning this ini­tia­tive, the Shroffs have con­tacted oleo­tourism oper­a­tors to pitch the idea.

“We’re just going to have to prove the use case,” Vijay said. ​“We’re going to have to talk to peo­ple and make sure that there’s an oppor­tu­nity for peo­ple to dis­cover what we do.”

Taking a broader view, Vijay and Alicia agreed that con­nect­ing the retail shop­ping expe­ri­ence with oleo­tourism could also rein­force the facts about olive oil pro­duc­tion and dis­pel com­mon myths and dis­in­for­ma­tion, espe­cially those sur­round­ing cook­ing with olive oil.

“In addi­tion to cul­ti­vat­ing lesser-known vari­eties, what I think these oleo­tourism grow­ers do is cul­ti­vate aware­ness and knowl­edge,” Vijay said. ​“There’s a lot of dis­in­for­ma­tion and mis­un­der­stand­ing about extra vir­gin olive oil.”

“When peo­ple see that olive oil is like the juice of a fruit, much like orange juice and not a processed food, like every other edi­ble oil, that helps,” he added. ​“Their sto­ries need to be told by grow­ers, retail­ers and every­one in the value chain.”