Reimagining Olive Oil for Millennials

Millennials, widely defined as peo­ple born between 1981 and 1996, are rapidly becom­ing a larger and more impor­tant bloc of con­sumers in the United States and around the rest of the world.

The World Data Lab fore­casts that mil­len­ni­als will soon have the most global spend­ing power of any pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion. In gen­eral, mil­len­ni­als dif­fer in the ways in which they choose to spend their incomes. This has led to vastly dif­fer­ent spend­ing habits than in pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions and has caused busi­nesses to adapt.

Olive oil pro­duc­ers and sell­ers are no excep­tion. From cre­at­ing eco-friendly health prod­ucts made from olive oil to rebrand­ing in order to attract new demo­graph­ics, pro­duc­ers and sell­ers are seek­ing ways to get the atten­tion of mil­len­ni­als and their wal­lets.

“Olives [and olive oil] are ancient but there is still a lot of inno­va­tion and a lot of dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties,” said Lucrezia Del Papa on the phone from Rome, Italy. Her busi­ness, Olivella, cre­ates skin­care and beauty prod­ucts with an empha­sis on nat­ural ingre­di­ents and envi­ron­men­tal con­scious­ness.

Del Papa, who grew up with olive oil for three gen­er­a­tions, took her family’s back­ground in trad­ing the prod­uct to cre­ate a brand tar­geted at mil­len­ni­als. Olivella does this by focus­ing on trends in brand­ing that appeal the most to this demo­graphic, such as sus­tain­abil­ity and min­i­mal­ism, turn­ing an every­day food into a must-have in anybody’s beauty arse­nal.

“I feel like, for my gen­er­a­tion, there is always a ques­tion in the mid­dle – am I being good to the envi­ron­ment so I can look good, or because these prod­ucts can help my com­mu­nity and my future? Do I really believe what I sup­port?” Del Papa asked.

The answer to this ques­tion lies in the way Olivella prod­ucts are pro­duced, using sim­ple ingre­di­ents that do not harm the envi­ron­ment to make gen­der­less prod­ucts in clean pack­ag­ing that every­body can feel com­fort­able using.

“There is a clear evi­dence that mil­len­ni­als care about the envi­ron­ment,” Del Papa said. ​“Clear evi­dence that if there is a prod­uct that does right by the envi­ron­ment and is not harm­ful when com­pared to a generic prod­uct of the same cost, they will choose the more nat­ural option.”

Olivella offers 35 prod­ucts, from mois­tur­iz­ers to body creams to lip roll-ons, made in Italy with ingre­di­ents that are 100 per­cent nat­ural. One of the most out­stand­ing aspects of the line is that no prod­uct has vir­gin olive oil added later. Rather, the prod­ucts are made directly from it, along with the by-prod­ucts cre­ated through the refin­ing process. Vegetable oil is also used in place of typ­i­cal ani­mal fat.

One of the main goals for Del Papa and the brand was to achieve max­i­mum effi­ciency to adhere to a zero-waste pol­icy. One exam­ple is Olivella’s bar soap.

“During the refin­ing process, you have fatty acids and by-prod­ucts,” Del Papa said. ​“We ana­lyzed all the prop­er­ties of the oil and thought of a way to reuse all the olive oil that was going to be wasted or sold in bulk to other com­pa­nies that would opti­mize the food pro­duc­tion process. So, we devel­oped the bar soap.”

Del Papa is con­fi­dent that the beauty indus­try will soon begin to offer more sub­sti­tutes for less envi­ron­men­tally-con­scious ingre­di­ents dom­i­nat­ing the mar­ket today. But for now, Olivella is focused on the strong pur­chas­ing power of mil­len­ni­als to buy nat­ural olive-oil based alter­na­tives to their favorite cos­met­ics.

“When I thought about my future, I wanted to do some­thing inno­v­a­tive and out­side-of-the-box,” Del Papa said. ​“There are so many ways to pro­duce olive oil and not in the ways that have been done for the last 100 years.”

Not only do mil­len­ni­als tend to look for dif­fer­ent types of value from their prod­ucts, but they also show a lesser degree of brand loy­alty than pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions. Olive oil pro­duc­ers have also taken note of this and are design­ing their prod­ucts accord­ingly.

“We found out that nine out of 10 peo­ple, espe­cially mil­len­ni­als, did not have a pref­er­ence for olive oil brands in the United States. They would buy what­ever was on the shelf,” Isaac Valdez, CEO of Catalonia Olive Oil Inc, told Olive Oil Times.

The com­pany wanted to cre­ate a prod­uct that was min­i­mal­ist, high-qual­ity, and afford­able. That is where its extra vir­gin olive oil comes in, made solely from Arbequina olives in the region of Siurana in Catalonia, Spain. Taking cues from other mil­len­nial-suc­cess­ful brands such as Halo Top ice cream, Valdez and his team devel­oped a firm under­stand­ing of what the olive oil indus­try was miss­ing.

“We wanted to make sure that we had the right prod­uct,” he said. ​“We tested the mar­ket and talked to dozens and dozens of chefs, food­ies, restau­rant own­ers, and blog­gers. A lot of those peo­ple have now become our brand ambas­sadors.”

One of those ambas­sadors is Sindy Lazo, win­ner of the first MasterChef Latino com­pe­ti­tion. Lazo and Catalonia Oliva Pura have also turned to the Latino mar­ket in the United States to reach mil­len­ni­als in a demo­graphic long-under­rep­re­sented in generic super­mar­kets.

“The Latino mar­ket in the United States has typ­i­cally been pegged as hav­ing lower-end, cheaper prod­ucts,” Valdez said. ​“You would go to super­mar­kets and see a Hispanic or Latino aisle, or you would have Latino-ori­ented mar­kets.”

“But from a brand stand­point, the new gen­er­a­tion of Latinos does not feel like that. They are not cheap and are edu­cated enough to know that a lot of the cheaper prod­ucts are harm­ful to them,” he con­tin­ued.

Three out of the five part­ners at Catalonia Oliva Pura are mil­len­ni­als, and they are reach­ing con­sumers in their own demo­graphic with a com­pet­i­tively-priced prod­uct. Valdez went on to say that sim­i­lar olive oils could retail for $14 or $15, whereas the typ­i­cal mil­len­nial con­sumer has got­ten com­fort­able pay­ing $6 to $8 for a 16 ounce bot­tle.

Understanding what mil­len­ni­als, and mil­len­nial Latinos wanted, Valdez and his team priced their extra vir­gin olive oil at $8.99 with sim­ple pack­ag­ing that the tar­get demo­graphic grav­i­tates toward. ​“We stripped the label down to the basics, went with a bot­tle that was not too fancy, and took away the cork,” Valdez said.

But mak­ing mil­len­nial con­sumers rethink olive oil also meant that the brand’s labels needed to be mean­ing­ful. Catalonia Oliva Pura has done this with the usage of phrases such as ​“I am extra vir­gin” on its bot­tles and ​“Not fake” on its t‑shirts.

“I think that mil­len­ni­als who are now more edu­cated and have access to more sources of infor­ma­tion have the abil­ity to really do their research before they con­sume any­thing, and that is where we come in,” Valdez said. ​“We really want to present an alter­na­tive in olive oil.”

• Financial Times