The Story Behind Starbucks Oleato

Howard Schultz, who rose from the gloomy hous­ing projects in Canarsie, Brooklyn, to build the world’s most valu­able restau­rant brand and con­sid­ered run­ning for U.S. pres­i­dent, is talk­ing a lot about olive oil these days.

“If some­one took a blood test of me,” he told CNN recently, ​“I think my blood’s com­ing out gold, I’ve had so much olive oil.”

Last February, Starbucks announced one of its biggest launches in decades — a fusion of cof­fee and extra vir­gin olive oil. ​“I know it will trans­form the cof­fee indus­try,” Schultz said about the new Oleato line of drinks.

The news swept through another indus­try in dire need of a trans­for­ma­tion, elic­it­ing cheers from stake­hold­ers who saw new oppor­tu­ni­ties. ​“Giving [extra vir­gin olive oil] value through cof­fee could relaunch its image, mostly among the younger gen­er­a­tions,” said Anna Cane, pres­i­dent of the olive oil group of the Italian Association of the Edible Oil Industry (Assitol).

Olive oil pro­duc­ers and mar­keters have long bemoaned the lack of con­sumer knowl­edge about olive oil, its health ben­e­fits and its usage. Here was the CEO of Starbucks wax­ing poet­i­cally on a ​“lus­cious, vel­vety fla­vor that lingers in your mouth.”

“In over 40 years, I can’t remem­ber a moment in time where I’ve been more excited, more enthused that demon­strates the pride, the qual­ity, the pas­sion, the her­itage and the craft of what Starbucks can do,” Schultz told CNBC. ​“I’ll carry the Starbucks flag and the American flag all over the world for Oleato.”

It was­n’t just olive oil Starbucks was pro­mot­ing with its new drinks; it was extra vir­gin olive oil. And it was­n’t some no-name blend; it was Partanna Nocellara del Belice from Sicily.

“People are gonna add a table­spoon of Partanna extra vir­gin olive oil to their drink,” Schultz pro­claimed. ​“I’m sure of it.”

Starbucks cam­paigns, news reports and social media have pro­moted the Partanna brand along­side the famous Starbucks logo in a stun­ning pub­lic rela­tions tri­umph for Tommaso Asaro.

“We met in New York, then we went to Sicily,” Asaro said about his first dis­cus­sions with Schultz, where the idea for Oleato took shape. The two were intro­duced by a mutual friend and talked in gen­eral terms about a cof­fee drink with olive oil.

Asaro is the fourth-gen­er­a­tion pro­ducer of Partanna, an award-win­ning extra vir­gin olive oil from the Valle del Belice in south­west­ern Sicily. And he was show­ing the Starbucks CEO around.

“Of course I took him to the touris­tic places, in town and our farm. He was stunned about the amaz­ing Belice Valley that he never saw before,” Asaro said of the visit.

“This sum­mer, I was once again cap­ti­vated by a trans­for­ma­tional idea while trav­el­ing through Italy,” Schultz wrote in a memo to Starbucks employ­ees about his visit to Sicily. ​“I came across a time-hon­ored tra­di­tion that trans­formed my cof­fee expe­ri­ence and improved my life. It was wholly unex­pected, yet the pos­si­bil­i­ties filled me with excite­ment.”

Asaro admit­ted he knew as lit­tle about cof­fee as Schultz knew about olive oil when they met.

“If you talked to me about cof­fee, prob­a­bly I was think­ing there were only two dif­fer­ent cof­fees in the world. But instead there are hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent beans with their own qual­i­ties,” said Asaro.

While Asaro and Schultz began form­ing the idea for Oleato (Asaro came up with the name), Starbucks rep­re­sen­ta­tives fanned out to taste oils around Italy before com­mit­ting to Partanna.

Amy Dilger, prin­ci­pal Starbucks bev­er­age devel­oper, likened the nat­ural sym­me­try between the two prod­ucts. ​“As I learned about Partanna extra vir­gin olive oil, I kept see­ing things that reminded me of Starbucks cof­fee, specif­i­cally how the ter­roir, the ori­gin, and the vari­etals con­tribute to the unique fla­vor and tex­ture,” she said.

“They tasted oils from many other vari­eties and places,” Asaro recalled. ​“We com­pared the prod­ucts, and there were def­i­nitely many great oils. Nocellara has a spe­cific taste pro­file and color and only grows in one area. With its smooth and nutty fla­vor, not so bit­ter, and lit­tle after­taste, it was the per­fect bal­ance.”

“I think of all the but­tery caramels that we mix with our cof­fee,” Dilger said. ​“That but­tery smooth rich­ness [of the Partanna mono­va­ri­etal] com­bines so well with our cof­fee.”

Unlike most major pro­duc­ers, gen­er­a­tions of the Asaro fam­ily have staked their busi­ness on one olive vari­ety in one Sicilian val­ley, work­ing with around 1,000 farms of all sizes and pro­cess­ing their fruit in one place. They have eschewed high-den­sity farm­ing, which does­n’t suit the Nocellara del Belice cul­ti­var.

Partanna and other Asaro brands have a long his­tory of win­ning awards at the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, which served as an inde­pen­dent ver­i­fi­ca­tion of qual­ity to the Starbucks team, and Asaro had the capac­ity to sup­ply a global retail chain. ​“They saw many sim­i­lar­i­ties between what we do here and what they did in Costa Rica,” Asaro told Olive Oil Times.

When the com­pa­nies reached an agree­ment, Asaro’s team worked with coun­ter­parts at Starbucks to develop cus­tom one-liter pump bot­tles and sync logis­tic sys­tems.

Starbucks takes pos­ses­sion of the fin­ished prod­uct in Sicily and dis­patches it to its dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters world­wide. So far, Oleato is served at roughly 4,000 Starbucks in the United States, Italy, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Japan, Asaro said. In a few months, they will launch in China. Starbucks has 36,000 out­lets in 80 coun­tries.

“They really want to do it right,” Asaro said. ​“The idea was, you don’t want to see the olive oil but you want to taste and get the ben­e­fits of it. To do that they have a train­ing place and they train in the stores.”

With the drink intro­duced in the U.S. just last spring, Asaro antic­i­pates a sales surge in the com­ing colder months. ​“September is a month where the sales are pick­ing up again. People will come back from hol­i­days and return to their rou­tines,” he said.

Asaro sees Starbucks as the begin­ning of a broader trend to intro­duce the taste and health ben­e­fits of extra vir­gin olive oil in other prod­ucts.

“You’re going to see this in the next few years,” he said. ​“It’s already a sta­ple. So we are really going to break the rules and we have other things in mind where we can go. There is a big­ger place for olive oil. It is a super healthy food.”

“We need to fin­ish and com­plete the Starbucks project and get it to one hun­dred per­cent. But the expe­ri­ence of course brought me, and I think every­body else, to think out of the box,” Asaro said.

Meanwhile, Partanna, which, accord­ing to Asaro, is the old­est brand in Italy still owned by its found­ing fam­ily, is rel­ish­ing a thor­oughly mod­ern viral moment and a boost to its sales. ​“Because of the pub­lic­ity in Starbucks, they are dis­cov­er­ing the Partanna story,” he told us.

Asaro, who divides his time between New York and Sicily, has seen a lot of ups and downs in 40 years in the fam­ily busi­ness. His unprece­dented deal with Starbucks came, para­dox­i­cally, at a time of unique chal­lenges in the indus­try.

“This is really the most dif­fi­cult year that I remem­ber. I’ve never seen any­thing like it,” Asaro said about the pro­duc­tion drop and price surge that he blames on erratic weather spurred by cli­mate change. ​“My father says the same thing. It’s the worst he’s ever seen.”

Still, Asaro, who has led a tran­si­tion to organic pro­duc­tion in the Belice Valley, has a bull­ish out­look on the indus­try.

“Consumer nowa­days have much more knowl­edge on the prove­nance, vari­ety, method of extraction…the mar­ket is totally dif­fer­ent than we had before,” he said. ​“Of course the pric­ing should be aligned with qual­ity and I see the mar­ket really get­ting divided. So before it was low, medium and high qual­ity. Now I can say it’s either high qual­ity or really mass mar­ket.”

And he sees a con­tin­u­ing evo­lu­tion, through con­sumer edu­ca­tion, toward a higher regard for Liquid Gold.

“People need to learn more about how to use olive oil at home, put it every­where, put it in the salad, be gen­er­ous with it,” Asaro said. ​“There are so many things still undis­cov­ered.”