The Truth about Extra Virgin Olive Oil with Sarah Vachon, founder of Citizens of Soil

0:00There's so many abandoned groves, there's so many people leaving farming, even in this country. But we see this a lot in the Mediterranean with these farmers. And I was like, there's no incentive. Like, why? Why toil all day in the sun and work so hard for something when no one's actually going to pay you? Yeah, I was like, what if I paid you more than you make in this commodity system? Because we work so closely with farmers, like, their problems are our problems. Yeah. The climate crisis is our huge problem. It is our biggest barrier in a lot of ways. One belief about food you have completely changed your mind on.

0:31That fat is good for you. Fat is so good. Yeah. But the quality of fat is like paramount in that decision. I talk to a lot of young founders all the time who want to price competitively out the gate. Don't. Like, do not price competitively. Like, you cannot go back up. So start high and then you can go down. Don't start. Like, these people are barely making any money off their sales. nothing to reinvest, nothing to grow, nothing that's sustainable, nothing that's going to incentivize, you know, retail. What's been your lowest low of building citizens of soil? One of our batches from our second producer that we ever brought over who's still like one of our extra rares.

1:08Her oil came over and everyone always orders it right away like it's on pre-order and people want it and the batch was at the bottling facility and they disconnected the machinery wrong and it all went down the drain and it was a year's worth of her work. Before we get into today's episode, I want to give a shout out to a special sponsor, Sam Lawrence Recruitment. We all know that finding the right people or the right job can feel really overwhelming. And that's exactly where Sam comes in. He really just gets it. It's not just about ticking boxes. It's about connecting the right people with the right opportunities.

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4:08Sarah, welcome to Getting to Grow. I'm very excited to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much. I'm so happy you've come here to our offices. Yes, I'm being hosted by you, which is so fun. So on today's episode, we have Sarah Vashon, who is the founder of Citizens of Soil, which we have in the background over here, some 10 out of 10 olive oil, which looks amazing. And I love the fact that it's in like a wine bottle. I am obsessed with that branding. So actually, let's start with that. Tell me about the bottle and the branding. So it's in a wine bottle, well, for a couple of reasons. The main one being that the family we started this with, our close family friends are winemakers in the wine region of Crete, the island of Crete in Greece.

4:46And so we were kind of inspired by like this connection. And then like the more we got into olive oil, we realized that historically these were the same growers and the same producers in the same region. So everywhere that you grow wine, for the most part, you can grow olives. And so even just today, I had a call with producers and we were talking about the labor that we use. The labor in the groves comes on from the wine, the people who are harvesting the grapes and then they moved to olives so it has this like intrinsic connection um also whenever you start to think about like the profiles and how all these different varieties and flavors that come out of extra virgin olive oil much like you see in wine um you know whenever i studied olive oil i got my certification as a wine sommelier so that same crossover exists and how it can elevate food and change depending on which oil you select which wine you select and then there was just the fact that i tried loads of different bottles and i was starting the business and i had you know at one point like 50 different bottles floating around the kitchen and i was just seeing which one i enjoyed wearing it and i thought i just love the way that this burgundy wine bottle feels so yeah it's really nice to like premium and it looks it looks really intriguing like if i saw it on a shelf i'd want to go over and be like oh that's not why what is this this is what we get a lot people are like when i do i used to do samplings and selfridges and everyone would come up and be like oh is this wine this is wine i'd always be like extra virgin extra virgin just like shouting that because people thought they would just have a little shot of wine it looks great um so take us right back to the beginning where were you in your life your career when the idea for citizens of soil soil came about so i was working in sustainability um i've had a career in food and drink and so has my partner he still actually works in um craft spirits um he's been like an international whiskey judge and wow and then jen so he has an incredible palette um he has a big like understands the nuance of provenance and where things come from and how they taste differently, like the aspects of terroir that we see in wine.

6:35He had a big appreciation for that. But I was working in sustainability, doing big, deep dives into food and drink supply chains and really understanding a lot of the issues in our food system from a environmental and a social perspective. So we were doing projects around coffee and tea and looking at, in particular, the people that were doing the work at the first mile, like the laborers, the smallholder producers and farmers who were rewarded the least as this commodity exchanged hands over and over and got sent to all these middlemen throughout and everyone was taking a cut and holding it till the value no one was incentivizing quality no one is incentivizing nutrition and i was seeing this kind of happen in olive oil and as a result when you don't pay farmers fairly there and you incentivize them purely on the weight of their crop they are going to produce things and take it to the bulk commodity and cooperative mills that are just paying them on that so they will cut every corner when it comes to quality and they will cut every corner when it comes to the land because they are just they are not making enough for a good livelihood i mean there's so many abandoned groves there's so many people leaving farming even in this country but we see this a lot in the mediterranean with these farmers and i was like there's no incentive like why why toil all day in the sun and work so hard for something when no one's actually going to pay you no wonder they're sending their kids off to be like do anything but this literally in greece they're telling their children do anything but this farming um and yet it's this superfood in the case of extra virgin olive oil going back to antiquity so i was like there i've seen all this in the sustainability space like happen and unfold i was seeing um systems like in coffee and chocolate and people having a craft and fair and artisan movement around those categories and i thought this should be happening with olive oil this other ingredient that's been with us since ancient times and how can I incentivize farmers and so that was the headspace whenever we started the business we also happened to have really close family friends who were small-scale producers and I was able to you know be there during harvest and learn more about it and really get like an appreciation app in a way that like almost you could only get as an outsider because I see sometimes that I try to convince our Greek pseudo family about how incredible it is they're like sometimes they don't see it they love it from like a you know family connection but sometimes they don't see the magic that you see as an outsider coming in um and yeah i was like i what if i paid you more than you make in this commodity system so you could reinvest in the land so you could do some of the things that you've dreamt of doing but also just uh build in biodiversity build in more resiliency invest in like soil health what if i do that can we like make this you know business together and that really became the foundation of it and that's what still exists today me finding incredible small farmers incentivizing them on sustainability on nutrition on regenerating their groves.

9:21I'll pay you more for a better outcome from a nutritional perspective and a flavor perspective, but also better for your groves. And that became the model. So you don't just work with one supply, you work with a variety. I am about unearthing and curating the finest extra virgin olive oils. I do not care where they come from. No one region has a monopoly on quality, no one variety, no, I mean, people can have their preferences like you would wine, but I'm just out there to find the best producers doing the best things by the land and by their community, which is also why I work with independent growers, and bringing those to market, celebrating those people.

9:56I've never heard of that model, so that's a really unique way to bring a product. Well, I have it on. It kind of, I mean, it exists. Well, you see it in wine, of course. You see it in wine, but in a different way of one business working with different growers. Because I think in wine you have it more from, I guess, region. sure yeah like south africa's known for its specific wine like a shenobog that comes from that area versus like you don't go elsewhere whereas you're up for maybe exploring the world whole world yeah i mean we just um i was just speaking earlier today with our producer from south africa because we've launched an oil from the southern hemisphere wow and uh yeah so south africa as we know has beautiful wines has this incredible climate that really supports that same harshness and but sunshine that the olives need so yeah I'm going and I talked to producers in South America you know Japan makes some incredible oils they're really there's fascinating places that are starting to make oil so there's a lot of travel involved there is a lot of travel involved I don't really travel I yet being you know still kind of a startup scrappy startup I haven't really gone even into the southern hemisphere yet that's the one grove that I haven't visited although she's come to me twice um but I uh I mainly am in the med all the time like every I'll be there like twice this month wow gosh that's kind of a nice perk right it is but if you heard my travel plans I mean I leave on Friday morning I visit a producer Friday evening I wake up Saturday drive three hours go visit another producer drive an hour visit a producer have Sunday off and then visit a producer drive another two or three hours meet a producer and then that same day drive back to the airport and fly back to London so it's not exactly like yeah hanging out by the pool yeah it's very different it's a bit on the road and how do you find your independent growers so we started with these close family friends and to be honest I think that's all I ever thought the business might be like I just want to help them out and I want to sell this maybe at like a local farmer's market in London or that was the extent of what I thought at the beginning I didn't really until I started to get into the world of olive oil I wanted to do my course when I became a certified sommelier I wanted to start like learning it kind of set me off of this journey to want to learn about olive oil and by learning I started to encounter really interesting people so I would I'd be like what's why does this region in Croatia win so many awards more were awards per capita in any other region in the olive oil space.

12:28I've never even heard of it. I need to go there and find out what's happening. So I literally took a trip, you know, flew into Venice, drove around to this peninsula, the Istria Peninsula, and met all these award-winning producers and went to their facilities and just learned and had chats and conversations. I did the same thing in Portugal. So that started to like open up and me just meet people kind of on my travels. I'm also quite involved. I'm a member of a group called Women in Olive Oil, and we have um well at least hundreds maybe like thousands of members around the world wow um supporting the empowerment of women in agriculture particularly um and so i meet a lot of incredible women through there i look at who wins awards and now i have this base because i started with like the most incredible farmers you've ever met like the the ones that have a lot of respect in their individual regions so now people kind of come to us and we get a lot of like referrals so our producers will sometimes help us find other farmers and other producers um or just like that word of mouth um from you know the fact that they're working with us and is it something that you I guess like being an entrepreneur being a founder is there something you've always wanted to be and always wanted to do or was it more that the opportunity was there and then you kind of like you took it versus I that was going to be your path after coming out of your road in sustainability um I so both my husband and I come from entrepreneurs both of our all of our parents um particularly my family you know my cousins my uncles like literally on both sides my family are all entrepreneurs uh for better or for worse not always not always the most successful but we um are are like that um so and my husband had started a business after his MBA so I'd seen him on this path you know for the past 10 years uh first 10 years of us being together he had been an entrepreneur, which isn't very glamorous whenever you're actually in it, you know, you don't make very much money and you're having to take a huge amount of risks and you never get a holiday.

14:24But I think it just like drew me in somehow, which is crazy because I do love my holidays. And the fact that I like actually can't take a holiday without my laptop is crazy. But I think there was something to it. I think it was like I had a vision of what I wanted to make. And if it wasn't there and I couldn't find that company to go work for, then I was just going to do it myself so like very ambitious and like get like go get a energy yeah I've always been I've always banked on my work ethic yeah um I've gotten more relaxed as I've gotten older but there was definitely a time in my life that I was like I'm not the smartest person in the room but I can like outwork anyone um and that has kind of just gotten me through I love that I like that a lot I can outwork anyone that's very good that's a very good sentence and in the very early days what did you underestimate most about bringing a food product to market?

15:15I mean, I knew nothing. Like I had mainly spent my career in agency to date and be it like that sustainability consultancy side or, you know, advertising agencies and marketing agencies. I, my husband having worked in drinks, I had like an idea of how some of it worked. But the difference in extra virgin olive oil is that it's a fresh ingredient. And a lot of people don't treat it like that, but they should because it is literally the fresh juice of the olive fruit. And so it has like a, you know, it has a shelf life and it's better at the very beginning than it is a year on and two years on it's flat.

15:52Whereas you can sit on a case of whiskey and it's only going to increase in value. So like the whole like, I know I don't have a short shelf life like some of my other food founder brands who have, you know, a fresh food. My gosh, I don't know how people do that where you have to shift it in like a week. Yeah, that's me. yeah but I have like um I that concept was like completely new to me even though it is ambient um because I deeply care I want people everyone to try it like the first month but like that's not what actually happens and so they could try your product you know 12 months on and it's like a bit you know more mellow and maybe not how you want it to be presented yeah I think there is especially working with fresh versus ambient and there's such a it is such a different like kettle of fish in terms of how you treat the product and supply chain and stuff so like that's also like yeah in the early days can be really just like getting your head around that it's just different challenges on the other side I have to commit to harvest once a year I buy everything once a year I put deposits my cash flow is insane no one envies what we have to pay for up front versus I suppose if you're doing fresh you know or even even my friends that have great other packaged good businesses they just go to their manufacturer every month and they can place that order or scale up in two or three months that's not an option for me I work with the land I work with producers and it's a forecasting I make a year in advance wow okay and talk me through the process of making an olive oil like like basic layman term for anyone listening like how did how is olive oil made uh so extra virgin olive oil is so how you make olive oil is you are picking the olive olive is a fruit like a plum or cherry you're picking that off the tree and you are getting it to the mill as soon as possible within hours within half an hour or two hours is like how you get to be like one of my extra rares um other people it's like within that same day or 24 hours um so you get it to the mill you kind of mash it into what looks like a tapenade and then you run it through a centrifuge that just extracts all that oil and so that oil that comes out from this basic tapenade is virgin oil so how you become extra virgin is it actually has to undergo So a lab analysis and a sensory analysis.

17:59And if it passes those two things, then it gets the credentials of extra virgin. Even with an extra virgin, that sounds like a lot because it is. Like there's a huge, you know, quality indicator. You're basically being like this is, you know, sometimes if you think of people are more familiar with like an apple. So if you take a really crisp apple and you just like immediately squeeze out, you know, get the juice out. And that freshness, that crispness that comes through. versus if you get one that's bruised up, banged up, maybe already has some brown spots, and then you turn that into a juice.

18:28And then if you let that juice sit there for, you know, as you're making all these things kind of start to contribute to that quality that we're looking for in extra virgin olive oil. And even in extra virgin, there's quite a wide spectrum, which is where people, I think now people are understanding a bit more about how extra virgin olive oil, like, oh, it's, it's, uh, you know, better for you. And it has this, you know, health properties that the regular olive oil if it doesn't say virgin it's refined and if it's refined if it's not virgin then that means it's undergone heat chemicals um sometimes it's bleaching and deodorizing all sorts of things to stretch it as much as possible and remove any defects and then they add like a little bit of flavor with a virgin oil on top of it but it is a completely different animal it is the difference between a fresh squeezed juice and like orange soda like that is literally you're having fanta or you're having a fresh squeezed orange juice as apart from our nutritional and a production like the mass process that's happened with this one versus something that's yeah just fresh so when I think of olive oil as well I have my drizzle olive oil so my stuff that I put on like my salads and I like top it on my pasta or however on my eggs you know anything that I like to have like served yeah and then I have my like cooking olive oil sure am I doing it wrong if I'm cooking with extra virgin olive oil like not like a bog standard one but like a nicer one but maybe like not the most premium one in the supermarket and then I have like my bougie one that I buy from like a farm shop or like I do luckily get spend some time in South Africa um and when I'm there there's a vineyard that I love and I always buy the olive oil from that I bring that home and that's my drizzle one yeah no I mean and I only use virgin oils and virgin olive oil for like all of my cooking um as most people in the Mediterranean do as well.

20:10So that is the cornerstone of the Mediterranean diet. And like that is how it works. If it didn't work, then the Mediterranean diet, and there's a Dr. Simon Poole, he always says this, Dr. Simon Poole here in the UK, who wrote the book on the Mediterranean diet, like if extra virgin olive oil didn't work in cooking, then the Mediterranean diet wouldn't exist because it's the only oil they cook with. So this is the most celebrated diet in the world. And this is the oil that they use. The refined oil is not a thing. It is not a thing from a health perspective. it's not a thing that's been going on for a long time so you are really looking for um extra virgin but i think it's a cost perspective like why would you use a really expensive oil and pour it all in a pan with potatoes and fry it up you're going to lose the flavor and you're going to lose a lot of the nutrition yeah so i think it makes complete sense and a lot of my producers i do the same thing that they do we use like a virgin oil or an older oil maybe last harvest oil that's what we kind of cook with and then we finish everything with like a really fresh zippy you know um more earlier harvests or just more intense oil so you're on the right track okay I think that's what I tell people to do I love oil of olive oil so much I'm not scared of it either like I'll drizzle it over everything I'm not like oh it's high calorie I don't care like I want it to coat everything it's so good yeah I mean it is this is a incredible superfood you know Dr.

21:27Tim Spector often says if he doesn't believe in superfoods but if he did extra virgin olive oil would be that um that would be the one um this is something back since you know antiquity has been written about and celebrated and it's packed full of antioxidants and polyphenols and the nutritional benefits were only just uncovering so like um it is something you should use as a sauce and pour liberally over all your food because it is just the anti-inflammatory properties alone and how it's good for your gut and all of this and feeding your mind and energy all of these things are like reason to enjoy yeah life's too short anyway so just get it in you um and talk us through some maybe like early operational challenges that you had that you didn't see coming um well working with all these different producers was certainly not originally in the plan and so there's just complications that come from that like a lot of people were like why don't you bottle and creep you know we first started with our family even our family there was like you know in their wine facility they're like just bottle here like we have the bottles do it all here label it'll cost you like a fraction of the price and like it's better to bottle from source is what a lot of people tell you um but the fact that we've always pulled we set it up always to come to the uk which was kind of beneficial because now we work across all these different regions so it wouldn't really make sense to do that and bottle from one specific place because then we'd be shipping our glass and packaging all over the med and back and you know our our glass comes from um the ur comes from france so like that just doesn't make any sense to move it all the way down to create.

22:56So I think the operation side of working with a lot of small producers is a big challenge, but it's a challenge that I really enjoy. It is both the one of the hardest parts of the business and the biggest highlight and delight of the business. But they are not set up for export necessarily or, you know, new terms with Brexit or what to sell into a grocery store. You know, these supermarkets might say they want to support small farmers and independent businesses. they don't make that process easy and so there's like a lot of extra admin and paperwork that are put on small producers versus like really big manufacturing centers so that is quite a challenge yeah I can imagine you're you're dealing with so many like suppliers as such that ultimately like yeah it's having to like you know go like deal with all of that in your diary as well as just like you know there's so much going on for you and they all have individual needs so we just I was on a call this morning with our producers.

23:54There was 12 of them on the call, I think, or 14 of them were able to make it. And this was just like a check-in after Christmas and like harvest updates. So they could all kind of share things together. I mean, you could break those as they're going through. There's a chunk of them that are dealing with labor shortages, a chunk of them that are dealing with climate. Like I didn't really realize because we work so closely with farmers, like their problems are our problems. Yeah. The climate crisis is our huge problem. It is our biggest barrier in a lot of ways to what we're trying to do, because it will knock out 90 percent of someone's crop one year.

24:30I've had I have another call I have to make actually tomorrow for another producer that I'm not going to be able to work with. We worked with last year because the crop was so the quality was just degraded so much by the weather. Again, not really a reflection on the producer completely outside outside of their control. But this is, you know, fires, floods. my South African producer just had a fire um five days ago I saw about 800 took out 800 trees like they're about to harvest you know they're two months away from harvest because it's southern hemisphere and 800 trees are gone so these are we are dealing on the forefront of a climate crisis when you work this closely with nature and when you don't have backups to just be like okay well I'll just go to the cooperative and like sort another or go to this manufacturer and sort another batch yeah it's it's so hard and actually from my day job I work of um as head of um like new business slash out of home at the coconut collaborative and we are one of the biggest importers of coconuts into the uk and we all most of our coconuts come from shranka and there's so much weather changes that happen in that country from like yeah you can have like a typhoon or all this stuff and it hugely affects us hugely i mean coconut is everything we do when we have no coconuts there's no product yeah so i can understand from how from that point of view how well, yes, if it's their problem, it's my problem.

25:46Yeah, and I mean, the benefit of having this business that we've created now across regions, which it wasn't to, you know, be able to mitigate that, but it does, it means that one year I can dial up my Spanish oil versus my Greek oil, or I can, you know, go into Italy or try a new region, but it still impacts, like, the whole Mediterranean. It's having trouble. And you mentioned earlier about, you know, going to these farmers and saying, look, I'll pay you more, but for quality versus um like quantity and kind of the other stuff that they were maybe previously looking at how do you afford that how can you fund how are you funding citizens and so you're unable to give the farmer that bit more so we set it up that way from the very beginning so whenever we started with our family and i was like looking at the commodity price and i'm like i'm gonna pay you like triple that commodity price you know like whatever was at that time every year i'm like looking and because I knew I was going to pay so much more I knew that the oil had to look like be beautifully packaged I mean I am a career marketer so I was like okay it's not going to be like a rustic you know feel like you just picked it up on the grove it needs to feel super premium and almost like luxury and so that informed a lot of the decisions on our packaging and so making it feel as elevated as the oil is but justifying that price I think for consumers When I think of when we launched in Selfridges, which is like our first stockist, we're on shelf and the bottle said nothing.

27:10It was just like a beautiful, like our little soil print circle. And it said soil around the side. Like there was just, and it had like a little, like, these are the producers, but it had very little information. It didn't tell you that how it was like regeneratively farmed. It didn't really talk about the quality or any of the indicators that we put on the pack now. People just bought it because it was beautiful and it was just selling out because it was beautiful. and so I think that justification I was able to afford it because I've packaged it in a way that makes it premium um and yes that comes at a cost of course like our labels are more expensive the bottles that we use you know the pores that we use are like the most expensive in the market like all these decisions that we make but we hope that building out that brand and that experience helps people like justify the cost and also olive oil is actually something in your kitchen that you keep the bottle so it's not like other products where maybe you would decant like a packet of pasta you never keep the packaging of the pasta you put it in either your container a plastic container and then you put it in the cupboard right whereas olive oil I absolutely do not mind having a beautiful beautiful bottle beautiful bottle of olive oil sat next to my cooker yeah so we actually see both we see because we do refill pouches as well yeah because from Coming in from the sustainability world, that was like really important because I was like, gosh, I'm going to make this really beautiful bottle.

28:26I want people, I don't just want people to throw it out like right away. And like also like, oh, this drizzler is so nice. Like I want this to like last more than like one, you know, bottle use. So we did the refill because we did find that a lot of people, just like you're saying with the pasta containers, they also have like an oil and vinegar container. So it's not uncommon for people to have that. So some people buy our pouches actually and just decant in their own container or they would buy our bottle and reuse the bottle. um but you're right we have because it's so beautiful gifting is big for us and we hear all the time people like someone brought this to my house you know for a dinner party or my mother gave this to me for my birthday you know and it becomes something people want to share and then they're proud to like display because it just looks beautiful in their cushion it's actually a really good idea i've never really thought of that because usually for a dinner party you bring a bottle of wine but what if that person's not necessarily big into their wine but they love their cooking this was our whole christmas campaign i know i thought about wine this is something that now when you go to someone's house it is hard to kind of bring a gift because you're like who's drinking who's not drinking like there's lifestyle and diet reasons that yeah doing that um there's also just like even like other food sometimes I was bringing chocolate to someone's house last week and I'm like are they do they like chocolate are they just are they on a diet because it's like January are they not having sugar you know you're like having to like think about all those sorts of things where if you bring everyone can have extra virgin olive like there's not a diet or lifestyle that it's not inclusive to and it's going to last longer of the night and then it's something beautiful for them to have in their pantry or you know on their table to remember you by it looks lovely so yeah very excited to try it as well and if you were starting again what is one early decision that you would have made differently one thing I often talk about is like I didn't know what I was doing I don't think a lot of people do I didn't really know I wasn't very clued up on the startup scene despite being married to like an entrepreneur um because i think we were just we weren't starting it as a big business to grow and scale like we didn't even know we would ever fund rate like we didn't really know we were literally just trying to help our friends and like fix this problem that we saw and that that's kind of all we were after but had i thought um i suppose more ambitiously at the time instead of just wanting to help out my friends i would have probably um got my finances aligned much earlier like we came into this project we had just bought our first house we had just paid off our wedding debt like we had no money the um I think we actually officially launched we were like full-on in COVID like it was just like there was no my husband had like had everyone had like been made redundant or not um on furlough it was just a nightmare of a time and I if I had thought about it I probably wouldn't have done next time I start a business I will kind of go to buyers and start pitching out this product before I put up the whole investment.

31:14Yeah. Because again, we kind of went all in, spent all this money. And then it was probably a year before we were even selling it or getting it ready for market. Yeah. And I hear really savvy entrepreneurs, usually second time entrepreneurs or third time entrepreneurs, that they get a little mock-up and a little idea and a little sample. And they take this to a buyer and they sell it in and they have a guarantee instead of the very slow. But it was just because we weren't trying to build that, that we didn't go about it. but like my next business or if I'm trying to do something like that again I would really go at it like as if it's like a business pitch instead of spending all my money and time and effort on something that may or may not work yeah it's interesting actually because I think a lot of the founders that come on the podcast are it's very 50 50 split it's very much like some of them are they've done the research and they've got the samples and they're going running around with their sample before they have like packaging yes but then i have the opposite where they are so obsessed with what they have and their product they know it will work well that was us they're like yeah we were so defiant that we had like the best oil out there but it still means like you go through a long time without cash yeah and cash is trading without anything yeah yeah and um like in terms of the business and the demand of what's on your plate because yeah you're speaking to so many different producers what does take the most time and energy currently well we've just built out the team this year which was really exciting to have you know more of a team around us um so I think I'm starting to like let go of some of those things um I still think that the producers and the sourcing and the management of producers um has been like if i look back at this past last year that was like a big part of my role like not only did i organize a meetup so they could all come together but it's just like liaising with all of them and getting the sample and going out to visit them and um you know planning how much you know we're going to order this whole bit all this stuff that we would need from them uh has it been lab tested reviewing the lab tests like supply chain management um has taken a lot of time but although it is something I enjoy.

33:22And then learning D to C, like that is not my background. We somehow have this incredible D to C business. I say incredible because it's grown so well without any real strategy or, you know, someone kind of owning it to date. And so that's something that this year I'm looking to have people come in like outside support and kind of guide because when it's not something you've done it also just will take me like so much longer to do than someone who is an expert you know me setting up a product page and trying to figure out ads and like manage you know ad creation and that sort of thing yeah and I think actually DTC is the one it's a unique space for a business to play it's something that a coconut club we can't play in because we're chilled and we tried it and it just it's really difficult cost a fortune people don't bulk bar yogurt either like it's a one to week product that they tend to purchase whereas for us to make it work you know you'd have to maybe buy six or seven tubs at a time for the shipping to kind of cancel out so it didn't work for us but so many brands i've spoken to it does work and it's amazing because you have a very close connection to your customer yeah you can literally you have their email address you can email them be like i need feedback on this this and this you can send them direct offers to be like hey i haven't seen you boarded in a while here's a code and then it's quite lucky they might put in an offer sorry put in an offer make an order and then also you can have like just that connection with with your customer that it's really hard to do if you don't have that d2c presence that you can really understand them what they want what they need that if you don't have that it's quite hard because every supermarket you're not you don't get that like oh john bought it whereas you can see john bought it yeah i mean i will say there there's more and more of that supermarket data you can kind of start to tap into but yes i completely agree i love being able to call up our customers and we do insight calls and find out like why did you buy that or what how are you using this and just like what sort of product would you like us to launch like here's some different things we're looking at what did you like this year what do you want next year especially for something like our olive oil club where every month i'm serving up a different oil from a different place and i want feedback on do you want more intense oils do you want something more delicate are you just using it as like a shot in the morning okay maybe i should get you like a more like antioxidant rich oil versus one that's better for cooking you know so i'm trying to discover those things and i have the opportunity because we have that direct connection yeah it comes at a price i hear a lot of um you know um founders talk about oh well d to c you get to keep the margin well you invest that margin you pretty much give that right back out to your paid cost per acquisition um and then if you're in a supermarket they're taking the margin but like they're bringing the people to your shelf so yeah kind of like uh it's an interesting but i do like i like the mix i like being able to have this world to play in where i can test and i can learn and i can get these really loyal and engaged people and give them experiences like we did our pop-up at nodding hill and they could come and do aperitivo hour and do like tastings we're doing a tasting tonight actually a blue monday tasting i don't know when this airs but blue monday um like a tasting to kick off the year and guide them through we um there's yeah just different experiences you can give them but then I also like I'm proud that Waitrose is like our first stockist and I love you know Ocado as a customer like these are yeah these are outlets that I'm really proud to be in and um yeah like like being up on their shelves and obviously scaling is is a big um I'm assuming something that you you want to do and you want to get more olive oil and more people's hands and especially systems of soil olive oil but obviously we just spoke about climate we just spoke about sourcing the right um partner to work with so what happens when you are serving a million to two million bottles a week yeah and the crop isn't there because of a typhoon or whatever and you necessarily you might not have the right suppliers to work with because they can't bring you that quality how how will that change as you scale so that's something we've been doing we're working on now to build up the pipeline we already have access to more oil than we need because we have this network and that's part of the things that we do to bring our farmers together and have like the education side like on today's call we were just talking to them about like their basically their education grant that we're giving them each to use this year like an allocation to either visit each other to learn from each other or to go to a conference or for like a different courses so that side of like building up their resiliency and their network and having them find other farmers and like convert other farmers like them is very much a part of like the mission and you see this a lot in some of the great commodity supply chains that have had overhaul like a tony's what they've done in the chocolate space or what's the incredible coffee you know cafe direct and people have done in the those spaces like it's that network effect and that's what we're building up like alongside our business yeah that's really interesting because i was just thinking that actually how do you manage that but then i mean the educational piece that you just said is really important because actually that just incentivizes other farmers to get involved if you tell a farmer i'm going to pay you yeah substantially more to stop putting your chemicals yeah and stop tilling like you're you're in the right direction and so i think that's where we really want to get to as a business being able to convert right now we've already we've just gone after farmers who are already you know super inspirational in that space and what we'd like is to go after producers who aren't and convert them and that's like that's where you see really exciting impactful change and working with supermarkets as we mentioned they take their cut and how does sometimes their pricing structure or how they want to price it might not be something that you guys could do or they might need x amount of funding and trigger and you're like i don't like it's not possible basically what you're asking me like i physically cannot do with like my supply chain it doesn't work because your story is so impactful from a sustainability point of view what you're trying to achieve is way bigger than supermarkets margin right now like this is a game changing piece of I guess newness in the industry how do you have those conversations and break it down with the buyer so I think some of the supermarkets like when we look at Waitrose they have a whole program now for farming with nature which is trying to they have their own sustainability goals and they have their own things that they're trying to do in that space so they are really big supporters and advocates of what we're trying to do now those are conversations that you can have you know top level and then ultimately when you're sitting down with your buyer, it's as if that didn't just happen.

39:41They're like, didn't they just say that they need like regenerative suppliers and don't you have a shelf that has none? So you often see these when you're pitching and when you're having conversations with buyers. So there is definitely a challenge in that. And our mind is where we just have to show up with the data and the brand, like our brand delivers. It's beautiful. We have an engaged audience that care about what we're doing. And also we know that our rate of sale performs. So I think that's how you can try to get around it when supermarkets will really squeeze, which, you know, in Waitrose, we're actually not the most expensive level, but in some supermarkets, we certainly would be.

40:14And what does the bottle like are up? I know it's also your ranges, drawers. Yeah, pouches can start at like$16.50 and bottles can start at$19.50. Yeah. So yeah, we are looking at things that are quite premium in the category, although there's a whole other thing I can get into on why I think the prices of olive oil are way too cheap and unethical on the commodity side but we are in that premium space and i think it's about um making the case that your oil will perform or your product will perform but yes they will really try to squeeze you and we have had to say no and walk away from um like we cannot get you an oil for this price um it's just i i wouldn't even know i mean i know how i know how to get that oil but one i don't like the quality of that oil or two and usually both i don't like the um the sustainability side of that i'm not gonna i can't in good faith like tear up the land the way i see that that grower is so i can't buy yeah it's interesting because like supermarkets they want newness they want something different to bring to their customer yet they're also asking for similar pricing that they already have on shelf and it's like it's kind of impossible to give you the newness and the sustainability that's unmatched to what you have but at the same price point as someone that doesn't necessarily give a shit about sustainability I see this a lot even in our category like new brands new entries are coming in and they are sometimes premium um and I'm like their costs are just like there's just no way like they are definitely taking home a nice healthier margin um than we are um that's just because we pay like farmers more at the start so I think I do I understand that the supermarkets have the challenge of we they have to support there's a cost of living crisis that is never ending it seems and they need to keep things affordable to their customers and I know if we run certain Facebook ads or something that aren't quite the right audience you know people will really complain about the pricing like there's a price sensitivity to audible but it's about finding your right audience in there because on the right shelf and in front of the right audience it's just going to sell and it's going to make sense and people are going to appreciate it not just as a food in our case not just as a food but as a nutritional supplement and there is a massive growing trend for that and need for that and people want something that is going to be good for them and gut brain access to inspectors doing obviously an amazing job we're trying to educate and all the precious food you know it's not going anywhere yeah so we're learning a lot every day with this as well and what does success look right look like right now for citizens of stoil at this stage in the journey what does it look like right now yeah um so we i coming out of Christmas I was really happy with how our end of the year went we were 140 % up year on year which actually we weren't so happy because we were more ambitious but we had some like glitches along the way that meant that we weren't able to achieve what we really wanted to but still who can complain being up 140 % our club members are flying like we are growing our club which is really exciting because every time we get more club members it gives me the opportunity to kind of reach into new small farmers and so that's what i was talking to my farmers with this morning it's like here's our like this is the number of club members we've ended the year on and like this is what we can do with it like maybe there's other interesting oils we can showcase to them um and so it really opens up just more opportunities from the impact side and what we can invest into farming and this like model that we're trying to build so it's yeah success to me is like happy farmers uh being able to invest in them a sustainable profitable business that also means that we can like grow at a healthy rate and how did you initially fund citizens of soil um and were there trade-offs for like the choice initially oh my gosh yes because well at first it there was no funding as i said we had just bought a house um my husband was furloughed for part of that year um we uh yeah it was a very difficult um and it was just out of our whatever money we could scrape together it was very much a bootstrapped operation we did we ran it out of our house we always used a packaging facility for like health and safety of course but like we would box up the orders and like label things ourselves sometimes and yeah it was just wild what we did those that first bit take it to the post office ourselves um so the trade-off for that is yeah you just don't have money i mean it's like the reality if you don't come for money you don't have a safety net or a family or somebody that can kind of support you, then there is no real safety net.

44:41And that's when there's real risk involved. It's one thing if you're fortunate and privileged enough to have a family that can kind of do that. And we still worked. It also meant that we worked all the way until we fundraised, until we got to the point that we had a strong business case, that we were growing at a rate we couldn't support. We could not buy enough oil. We could not keep the business running because the demand was far outweighed what we could actually afford. And from that point is whenever I finally, and it wasn't actually until this past Christmas that my husband, not this Christmas, sorry, last Christmas that my husband quit his full-time job, but he still works in consulting.

45:16So there's always going to be compromises because as a founder, often you are one of the lower paid people in your business, at least for a while at the start. And any money that you have, you're putting into your business yourself. You know, like I remember we sold our house and we're like, should we put this money into the business so we don't have to fundraise again for like two months or something. So you make a lot of compromises on holidays and buying homes and the splashy things that your friends might be doing but I think it far outweighs it because you enjoy the journey and you're doing and also like you can't put a price on purpose and I think you know yeah it's nice to have nice things etc but ultimately like I don't remember my friends for their handbags or their nice earrings although I'm looking at earrings thinking they are lovely oh vented they're so nice sustainability through and through I was just looking for me they're lovely that's why I said earrings but if they you know if I met you years ago and you're my really good friend I'd be like oh that's really cool what Sarah's doing I don't care about the stuff she has but what she's done has been incredibly impactful that's what I remember you for so it's that purpose that you also have every day that I think is big and I think you know I meet a lot of people like my friends like also you're so lucky you have something outside your day job that you really care about and that you have like a purpose to do and and I never thought about it like that because yeah if I didn't have this on the side what would I I'd have to do something else like I'm a doer person like type of human so I think for you it's like yeah you might not be able to do right now I'm sure one day when you sell and you're on it on your yacht in St Barts it'll be a different story but right now you won't be at Yonse Barts it'll be a little olive grope yeah in Spain sorry of course I'm staying with you maybe like one that doesn't use they're like really gorgeous boats that have no they're like done on wind you know the thing is like the course like I think every founder well especially if you raise money your plan is probably to sell that business at some point.

47:01I really enjoy the journey. I love olive oil. Like I want to work in it in some capacity forever. And I know, and I see a lot of businesses that start up and they're just, yeah, they might like the business, but they, if you gave them a check, they would like sign out. They just like, you know, leave the business immediately and be very happy with that. For me, um, I genuinely want olive oil to always be a part of my life. and I love what I do. And if I wasn't doing this, maybe I'd still do something with farmers to be able to support them in some way. And you said this year about finishing your team or like finishing it, building out your team.

47:38So how are you funding that now? Have you obviously, have you raised any more? Have you raised at all? Yes, we have done two fundraisers. So we fundraise really the first time for Waitrose, like when we got the Waitrose deal. If you look at that cashflow model I haven't talked about, we I think Waitrose told us in November we were going back and forth on how many stores you know like how many SKUs like how many stores what that would be so I had to source specifically for it so that was in November they told me the amount and I was like oh my gosh this is so much oil I have to buy like I literally can't so I went and found a new producer because I didn't have enough with the existing producers I went out and worked with her in December and January I flew to Greece bought the oil on the spot brought it over like February packaged it up in March and April's transferred over to Waitrose in April got it on shelf like May and June you don't get paid till that summer so like look at that cash flow look at how much money you just can't do that like how are you supposed to do that somebody tells you oh you're getting like 155 Waitrose stores it's a celebration but you're just like actually how am I supposed to pay for this um so that was our first fundraiser yeah you get to the point where you're like I need some cash I can't do it absolutely Absolutely.

48:47And then, yeah, we've had phenomenal growth on our D2C. It's now 70 % of our business, even though we're in Waitrose, and Ecato, and Booths, and Planned Organic, and Ordnums, and Selfridges, and some of our oils. Not all of them have our whole range, because we have some limited editions and interesting oils that aren't across the whole, all the retail space. But D2C is still 70 % of our business, so that required more fundraise. Yeah, it is a big part. And what financial lesson do you wish more early-stage founders understood sooner?

49:19um i'd say getting to grips with your margins yeah um a lot and we were we made this accident as well because when we first started actually our first stock is before selfridges was this was we were only going to be d2c so we just like got our price right for d2c um and not even know i went acquisition you know we didn't even run ads that first two years or something so it didn't matter um certainly didn't understand how that would work later on but we um when we got our first order was from a friend of ours who had a wine shop that had converted or so it was a wine bar that converted into a wine shop and they gave us um kind of like margins based on like markup it just wasn't accurate it literally wasn't how the whole market because they weren't really a wine shop they had been a wine bar and so they just done it slightly differently it meant we set all of our pricing as if like this was the word of god and like this is how it's going to be and it wasn't actually accurate.

50:13So then the margin wasn't that high in the end, which meant that all everyone was pushing back. Like, what are you talking about? This can't be. So that was a hard lesson and kind of had to like work with that. But I also see, I talk to a lot of young founders all the time who want to price competitively out the gate. Don't. Like do not price, like give yourself, you cannot go back up. So start high and then you can go down. Don't start. like these people are barely making any money off their sales nothing to reinvest nothing to grow nothing that's sustainable nothing that's going to incentivize you know retail so i think making sure you have a full grip on your margins and cost and everything is so essential at the beginning but it's probably every time i talk with a founder that's just starting up who wants to like you know kind of run me through it that's the thing they're always like well this price is like a bit too low but like this is what i've been told to do and i'm like why have to do that yeah you're right because what's your usp then like if you're going to go in and premiumize the category which is what exact like small fmcg is all about like that's what we're all trying to do right we're trying to make something nicer in that space and premiumize it and bring you know that you can't do what the philip of barrio whatever his name is i just hear that philip of barrio you can't do what they're doing because ultimately like if you could you would already be in supermarkets yeah so don't sell yourself short yeah like what you're giving the customer is 10 million triple billion times that quality yeah so don't give them the price yeah yeah yeah yeah it's it's i mean it doesn't make sense that you'd be the same price yeah bog standard which is on the shelf and everyone's familiar with um but it also leaves you no room to actually keep running your business for sure and you're right you can never ever ever go up you can come down i mean you can put through cpis and stuff but gosh the backlog of why and who and where and it doesn't really resonate with customers i mean yeah we've actually had to do it once on our olive oil club yeah we've had small incremental but it's not a comfortable thing and you certainly can't do it quite substantially absolutely um and thinking about the future when you think about the future um of citizens of what excites you most and what scares you um what scares me the most is the climate crisis which is like yeah a generational problem um so can't be solved by us alone but i do feel like it does worry me to the extent of well for me finding new regions and new producers but that doesn't I still have a lot of care and affection for my current producers and feel for them and what they're going through um so yeah I worry I think that that has a huge impact on our food system um and I don't think we've really realized the full extent I mean we see the headlines about the price of chocolate has gone up so substantially and like coffee's disappearing and we haven't maybe really felt it fully.

53:00And so I feel like we're really in for it. So that is scary. But the thing that gives me the most, I guess, joy or things to look forward to is, I mean, on the other side of that, I love the opportunity of what we could build out with farmers and the impact we could have with them. So even just like small little changes that are going to make their oils a better quality, which means that we could pay more so even if their yield isn't as strong we can make the case okay we're going to do these richer and antioxidant oils and that's what we're going to do so we can charge more for it so you can make more even though your yield is down it's going to help supplement the cost you know just because your yield is down doesn't mean you're going to lose that much money um that yeah building out the farmer program is really exciting and also like just getting people i love sharing the world of extra virgin olive oil with people you know we've taken our whole team out to harvest but this year we had a couple of our super fans go to different harvest with our farmers like one she did it must have been a couple weeks out in Portugal with one of our producers one guy he took I think his wife for anniversary or birthday with some friends out there to harvest with one of our producers in Greece and that connection of like literally farmed table but like you mean the producers knowing where it comes from and having a relationship is something that's why we put their names on the pack that's why we want to celebrate them like I love the fact that people talk about our bottles like oh anna's like the portuguese producer anna like when sometimes they comp they'll write comments and reviews and i'm like they know the farmer like they actually care and that's just like a total delight and joy and what i think is a really cool opportunity in the space and the community that you've built like that is priceless it's the opportunity a huge opportunity like building that no one can take that away so like having your community that support you and like back you because i think like if you're a massive brand you do lose a bit of that connection with your community like as you grow naturally that does happen but when you are at the stage of like early fantasy even like um like sme size having that community like brands i think people buy from people yeah i mean we've often talked about i want to make our marketing even more like farmer led like how can we get them more like the face of the business and get them involved so yeah i think yeah the community is definitely the opportunity and it's what that opens us up to a lot of interesting things that are offline as well that we can connect people to and what's your north star for 2026 if you have like two things you need to achieve this year what would be top um the biggest uh ambitious project is probably launching in the u.s okay um taking on the beast yeah taking on the beast going back to my roots um uh yeah about 50 percent of our organic website traffic comes from the U.S.

55:44right now and we just turn it away and we get requests for orders all the time. So we are trying to navigate that. It's been something we thought about for a few years and we put it off every year because I'm a big fan of when you start your business, like just do like play in your own backyard and like do well there, like make that win before you try. You often see founders really stretch themselves like one year and they're like, I'm now launching in Dubai and I'm doing something in Europe. And I'm like, oh my gosh, that's like so much of a stretch i mean it works for certain business models but for us like being so community centric and wanting to like really have relationships with our customers it just didn't work um so this year will be a test in the u.s and sending over some of our oils um and as the u.s is in a moment of uh change as well it's it only complicates it even more so it's quite a hurdle but it's uh it as the biggest consumer market in the world and one that's way more advanced in extra virgin olive oil in this country um they are a massive market for premium olive oils they understand it i mean this is why certain brands have already launched and done extremely well there so i'm excited to play in this space um yeah it's a u.s is a fascinating market if you crack the u.s i mean wow like so many brands have tried and it's like completely saved like five six million just by like looking at it exactly so that yeah the tests there i also think there's a benefit of both my partner and i being american knowing exactly the names of the stores how it works where we'd want to be yeah where we'd want to play um but yeah it's it's a it's a fun next chapter and what has building citizens of soil talked to you about yourself that surprised you

57:20um i i don't know actually i i'd say i i feel very confident in it in a way that i don't think I ever really felt confident in my career before like I have such a conviction in it coming up in agencies and marketing like obviously I was good at my job I kept getting promoted and having like really great opportunities but I don't think I ever and of course I still have imposter syndrome like crazy but I actually when it comes to olive oil I think I have access I don't necessarily I mean I don't think I'm like this incredible expert but I have access and I know so much like there's very little people can ask me that I don't know.