361: Graza Returns!

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1:05Our bottle itself has ended up in Architectural Digest. Like, there's been this weird irony of a plastic squeeze bottle with fun branding that looks beat up and wrinkled showing up in design magazines, you know, of, oh man, like, things you need to have in your kitchen. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbar.

1:32Today on the show, I welcome back Andrew Benin, the founder of Grazza, that squeeze bottle of olive oil that you have on your counter. They've got a big one and a little one. Took over the world by storm the past two years. We had Andrew on about a year and a half ago. He's back, and we go over what he's been up to, which is tremendous growth, about the mild controversy that he found himself in. He addresses it fully. And also, we talk about food. He's one of the biggest food fans I know. He loves restaurants. He loves home cooking. and we really get into some of his tastes and preferences and what he just loves about running, what is easily the buzziest olive oil company around.

2:11It's a really candid talk with one of my favorite founders in food, and I hope you enjoy this conversation.

2:25Andrew Bannon, welcome back to This Is Taste. What's up, buddy? I'm so excited to be back here. Round one was a hoot, so I don't know where round two is going to go. Round two is going to go to some cool places, and I wanted to have you back. You asked me, you're like, Matt, why am I back? I mean, first off, Graza is in our logo of our podcast. No big deal. NBD, and I feel if you're on the logo. It's been a huge revenue driver for us. You're full of shit. You're just, there's no need, you're not even gassing me. You're just like trolling me at this point. No, I mean, I brought you back because I think I still cook with your product.

3:00I like other olive oils, too. I just Susie Carache makes a nice one. I cook with hers. I just wanted to catch up about a lot of things, CPG stuff, the world of food media. Anyways, I want to know you're in New York. You live in Spain. You have a six-month-old. You just went through Harvest. We just had our whole team in Spain with us. We flew everyone out. So cool. And it was the best. It's actually cheaper to fly everyone to Spain than it is to meet up in New York. So and it was amazing. I mean, we saw start to finish harvest crushing bottling. Was the harvest good? You last time you said it was hard.

3:36Yeah, it depends on who you ask, right? There's winners and losers even when times are tough. I think that people conflate what a good harvest means. if you're expecting a 24 % yield from the fruit on non-irrigated groves, like, yeah, you had a really, really bad last two years. Like you did not produce olive oil at all. And in Spain, specifically, a decent amount of the input of the product is non-irrigated. These are old farms that sell directly to co-ops. They have 40-year contracts. And that's the difference between producing 800 ,000 metric tons and 2 million. And it is true that once again this year, global olive oil production will not exceed global olive oil consumption.

4:33That's a problem. So prices have been extremely high. On the flip side, there's a lot of politics involved in agriculture, you know, Spain saw olive oil consumption go down by 38%. Prices went up. So they just cleared VAT, which in Spain is 21 % tax on olive oil, specifically at the grocery store. And everyone celebrates and they're like, ah, the pricing is about to come down. Wrong. Pricing is actually going to stay exactly where it is because we need consumption to go down for pricing to go down. So I don't know. It's been it's been we're in agriculture like we're not just some pretty bottle like we're deep in it.

5:20Thankfully, we buy a lot of our oil in advance. So how was the on the culinary side? You know, you're starting to press this harvest from December. What are you what are you tasting? Are you tasting anything different? And second part is if I'm buying Grazza now in January or even when I'm buying it in June, is it going to be a little different from the previous year? Yeah. I mean, it's different from every single farm. So I just got my subscription two days ago. It arrived at my house and it had new harvest drizzle in it, which is really exciting. We don't market it where we're like old harvest, new harvest, because actually the better the oil is originally, the better it's going to hold up over time.

6:03So an early harvest olive oil, true early harvest olive oil in one year, if it's kept in optimal conditions, is still going to be significantly better than a new harvest, late harvest olive oil. Yeah. Right? So there's a lot of nuance. My drizzle was from Italy, believe it or not. Grazo this year, this is a change. I'm glad you said that because you were 100 % Spain, Southern Spain. We were 100 % high-end Piqua. High-end Piqua. So no, you're actually - Last year, we've bought around 100 ,000 liters of coratina from Italy. What's the percentage of that? Very small. It's from Bari. The reason we did that is because it's incredible olive oil.

6:48It's much more expensive than the picual that we buy. Italian olive oil, true Italian olive oil is more expensive than Spanish olive oil. So we bought some of that because we loved it. We needed it. We wanted to secure it. And I got it at home yesterday and it's phenomenal. We also bought picual from outside of high-end this year. And we bought picual from Portugal this year, from Alentejo, which if you live in Southern Europe, like it's right there. The last interview, a huge point of pride was we were only Southern. We were like, we could drive through the groves and like actually see all our olives.

7:25But now you're spread out. Are you feeling the same about your olive oil now? Big time. I mean, we're picking the primo stuff from the people that have it. And building long-term relationships with suppliers in Portugal is a huge advantage. It's massive. Like, we're eventually going to outgrow Drizzle from Haiyan. Like, we've gotten that big. There's not enough early harvest olive oil in Haiyan to just support Graça. So we need these relationships. And you can drive from my house four hours west, and you'll get to Portugal. Or you'll drive four hours east, and you'll get to Haiyan. You can still drive there.

8:00Exactly. And also you weren't like overly leveraging the Spain part of Grazo. Like you had to really talk to you. We're not Spanish gastronomy 2.0. Yeah. So it made sense to actually look outside of this region you live in. Yeah. Let me ask you, when I was in Puglia, we drove all through the groves and we saw a lot of dead olive oil trees, olive trees where you make the oil. And it was shocking. It was sad. And it was like, it was very sad. And so, and I didn't realize this ain't changing. So like, how bad is that going to get? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of different reasons why olive trees and olive groves are dying.

8:39Some people just don't want to take care of them. Sometimes they're exposed to plague and other times they're not getting water. They can be restored, but it's an investment, especially where you were. Majority is traditional harvesting, right? We just went to Spain. And the first thing that my co-founder Alan saw after for four years hearing about the miles and miles and miles and miles of olive trees, the first thing he said is, how the hell do we touch all of these? It is incredibly inefficient and it is laborious. And you have to go from tree to tree to prune and harvest. And there are billions of trees in this part of the world.

9:18a lot of people have switched over to super high density farming which is pretty much bushes of olive oil it does not produce as good of an olive oil objectively it does not but it has massive benefits in terms of scale and harvesting and harvesting and caring for the land and labor costs um so so yeah that's probably what's going on in bulia it's really really sad also depends on the olive varietal a lot of the time. Some olive varietals do not fruit every single year. Piqual does. That's why people love it. If an olive tree like a piqual has a poor harvest, the tree wants to flower. It's such a nuanced process.

10:03Okay, great. You get to April, you get a great flowering. And one day it rains too much and it washes away the pollen in that exact window where you need that tree to pollinate and create fruit, you also lost the harvest. Well, I wanted to start with agriculture. Mostly, if our listeners who haven't met you or haven't listened to your first episode, you're not just some CPG bro who decided olive oil was cool to put in a bottle. You actually care about the agriculture. You care about the product. And I'm going to link to the original episode in the show notes because it gets into your history working at Gramercy Tavern, your time at Warby Parker, and the way that you kind of blended the two.

10:41I'm not going to relitigate that just so I want to be clear. But I want to ask you, 2023, you went from being very cool and very young and very buzzy. You went from that buzzy moment to like literally being everywhere. It felt like. And what were some firsts that happened in 23 for you as a brand? I think we had our first kind of we launched into mass retail. Yeah. And when you launch into mass retail, you become a data brand. There's no story to tell that isn't connected to numbers. There's no levers to pull that are not connected to numbers or dollars. And this was a first for us. You can't will a Walmart velocity from one to two.

11:30You can will a Whole Foods velocity from five to seven, right? Everything we do on social media, the food accounts that we interact with does correlate to a certain type of shopper. But at Walmart, it's not one for one. So there were a lot of firsts on what strategies we can apply to succeed and also what expectations do we need to set. You know, when we look at our Walmart data, it's up and to the right, but it doesn't meet Graza's expectations. But it far exceeds the industry's expectations. So is that top line revenue top up to the right and margin and EBITDA? I mean, margin, depending on which product.

12:11Right. It depends on the product. Depends on the product. But when we talk to other CPG brands or other strategics, like they're pulling out the data faster than we are. They're like, holy crap. You have 1400 % growth in the past six months. Yeah. Like that, that doesn't exist. The next closest person is 117. We're going to talk about strategics. I'm glad you brought up that word. We're going to talk about it near the end because I don't want to weigh down the future of Grazza. But still - Future's big. Yeah, future's big. And I want to ask you, is there a store count right now? We're at, I think, 9 ,900 right now.

12:48We will finish the year in around 17 ,000. Holy shit. That's amazing. Yeah. That's like 100%. Yeah. It's exciting because similar to beverage, like this is a distribution play. Once you're in the stores and you're selling two, three, four, 44, 100, whatever it is, bottles per week, that is exponential growth. It comes with its own challenges about how you invest as a business. Does it make sense to just invest in promotion and always be on promo at the right times, which we have to pay for at retailers? or does it make sense to build a brand and invest in things that don't have a exact ROI? What's the answer?

13:30Or is it both? I mean, you think about Rayos as an example. I think about why someone over the past 10 years has always been willing to pay$8.99 for Rayos instead of$3 for Prego. And that's not because Rayos is on promo. That's because of the brand that is Rayos. Our industry is pretty similar. it's a you know fine art on how to create it but there if we play a value game we're always going to lose there's always going to be a cheaper adulterated olive oil below us i'm not talking about adulterated with other cooking fads or cut yeah i'm talking about evoo is a laboratory test and a sensory panel for a laboratory test to pass you can do a lot of things to that product that won't come up and you'll get an EVOO cert from a lab.

14:21On a sensory panel, someone should be able to suss out what's what. And speaking of that, where could it put you at number one? Number one in grocery, which was even cooler. It wasn't like number one olive oil, number one olive oil brand. They're like, number one olive oil, you can buy at grocery stores right now. What about retail advertising? I don't want to get too nerdy. It's not that kind of show, but do you invest in retail advertising? Is that part of the model? Yeah, you have to. You have to. You have to show affinity and partnership to the big retailers. Of course you need to give them money and they need to give you support, outside support that they don't give to everybody.

14:55I think it's so detailed. You find out that the brands that are private label suppliers to retailers are gonna get preferred treatment. Of course they are because they're supplying another huge revenue stream. So you gotta play. You gotta be there. You can't, there's no shortcuts here. So Andrew, let me ask you, do you hit up the shoppy shops the shoppy shops we had emily on the show it shouldn't coin the term but she made it popular and you know it seems that gratza in 23 became the go-to item in the shoppy shops of the land we can talk about fare a little bit because i think that's definitely driving this but do you like hit up places like monsoon market in phoenix or places like pop-up grocer in new york that have been big champions of your brand since day one yeah we talk to them all the time.

15:43I mean, I think Monsoon Marketplace in order today. So the way we hit them up is, for example, we've launched three cooklets, we call them to date. There are mini cookbooks. And we coined this term cooklet. And the thinking was, man, cookbooks are really big. I don't use them all the time because they just kind of sit on my cookbook shelf. And they're big. I'm not going to bring them over to my stovetop all the time. Let's make these little cooklets that just end up in your knife drawer, your cutlery drawer. We made one that was all about salad dressings. We did it with Jess Damik after she launched Salad Freak.

16:23We launched Drizzle Freak, which was all about making salad dressings, which people whip up with a Pyrex, a little thing. You just need a little cooklet, a little inspiration. We did another one with Natasha Pikowitz for desserts. And the only people that get those cooklets besides our customers are our top shoppy shops and we give it to them for free. And we're like, listen, we created this amazing thing. It obviously costs money to publish, use it in your store to drive Graza revenue for your store. We don't only use it for our online e-commerce store. We try to take care of people in different ways.

16:57We can't pay to promote at those places. In fact, they have more control over their margin than a retailer does because they can charge 20 or 24 dollars for graza where someone else charges 16 or 18 um but we give them amazing materials that no one else gets um they're they're still you know proudly the the most profitable out of home advertising in the world that's so cool to say that and i know you're working on some other like printed projects um let's talk briefly about fair um a platform that we've dabbled in a bit on the show and in the print pages of taste or the online pages. I feel like FAIR is that like juggernaut in terms of like bringing this many of the founders and brands we talk about on the show to the market.

17:43What's your relationship with FAIR? A really strong one. Yeah. Are you like number one on FAIR? We are definitely one of the top brands on FAIR. We participate with them on improvements to their platform. Bear is essentially, I want to call it a hyper curated, extremely efficient marketplace for what's cool in design, food, home goods, in a way that even though individual stores in theory have access to all the same stuff, which I think is what Emily's article was kind of about. Like, why is everything looking the same? I don't think FAIR does a disservice to the suppliers or the stores. They really curate what's the best for the customer.

18:30And there's still room for individual stores to purvey plateware relationships that aren't available on FAIR. So for us, it's been an extremely efficient way to meet and interact with stores from Tempe to Seattle to Bangor. can't have a direct relationship geographically with all these places. There's no centralization. Fair enables that. Yeah, I want to have the fair founders on the show. I feel like it's super important. It definitely hasn't had that big moment yet in terms of media. Let's talk about the collabs because this year you did some cool ones. We can talk briefly about the Deuce & Deuce & Oven Mitt, which I think is really neat.

19:13I love that brand. Started in Brooklyn, very cool brand. But let's dive into your collab with Ouroboros. Paul Vogue was on the show recently and I just I love Ourobora and like my favorite print product of 23 was your collaboration your olive oil dry martini N.A. which is now back available apparently it was sold out for a while but it was now available fucking great I love it it's so good I crushed them at our office and there was a lot of dialogue of this doesn't taste like an olive oil martini you know that right And I was like, one, be a bit more pragmatic. Like, let's all be a bit more positive because life is fucking hard.

19:56Two, like, it's delicious. Why are you not saying that? It tastes amazing. It tastes like vermouth. It has an olive oil flavor. It was delicious. And I could drink six of them and not get tired of it. Like, that's what it's all about. You know, I wasn't trying to create the next Grey Goose non-alcoholic canned beverage. And neither was Paul. We were trying to do something amazing, fun that's never been done before. and I mean that that collab truly started out of a joke at a trade show Paul said that truly like I met them for the first time Paul and Matty have amazing energy I was over the moon Graza's first trade show we're not showing but people people were excited and I was like man we should what's a weird brand it's a weird place that Graza can show up and I was like Royal Caribbean like that's where I want to be.

20:47And I want to be there with Ouroboros. I want to make, I want to get a canned beverage on a cruise ship. Forget about it. Cause I remember when I worked at Casper, like, and magic spoon also the gold standard for getting your product somewhere was the airline. I was like, you know, the airlines, it's going to take forever. They're going to beat us up over dollars. Like let's focus on the cruise ships. They're making a comeback. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so that was the idea royal caribbean never responded and we still did it it's great i'm just gonna say i like the it does taste like a martini personally there's it has the gin astringency the bitterness the bite is there and of course the olive oil um the smoothness what you'd like in an olive oil martini um i haven't drank in many years so i don't really remember that too much but i feel like it hit me in a way that if i'm going to be at the end of the day and i want to refresh the palate before having dinner i'm gonna drink one of those yeah really fun collab and the juice inducing you do these oven mitts that are really neat.

21:42You're selling them on your site. Yeah. I mean, Doosin Doosin is bigger than people think for the team that they have and for the studio that they have. I mean, they're one of MoMA design stores, top selling brands. They show up in kitchens. And what's cool about that is our bottle itself has ended up in architectural digest. Like there's been this weird irony of a plastic squeeze bottle with fun branding that looks beat up and wrinkled showing up in design magazines, you know, of, oh man, like things you need to have in your kitchen. We felt like Strafar, so we're like, damn, we didn't design Graza for that, you know?

22:20But Dusin Dusin definitely shows up in people's kitchens and it was thoughtful. It was like, you know, we don't want to launch something that screams Graza. Because once brands try to take over people's homes and go outside of their domain, I think they've lost it. They've lost control. They're pulling the wrong strings. Speaking of squeeze bottle, last April, you kind of lost your cool and posted some stuff on LinkedIn about a brand that was a kind of a copycat brand, at least for the squeeze bottle. Long story short, the New York Times picks this story up. I believe we texted that day. I wanted to ask you, you know, the New York Times is like writing this story.

23:00You responded in a couple different ways. Not going to relitigate, but I willing to an article that kind of does. I want to know, Andrew, and thank you for answering this question. Like, what did you learn from kind of stepping in it a little bit? I learned a lot. I injected negativity into the Graza organization. That is not my job. That is not my primary value as one of the founders and leaders of this organization. In fact, My primary job is to leave all my negativity and stress out of the office and come and be motivational and inspiring and supportive and give my team resources to continue to grow the brand.

23:48And this was the exact opposite of that. Was I passionate in my expression? Yes. But I injected negativity and I learned a lot from that. And from a product perspective, I do think that I had a hiccup in my thinking that Graza is just a squeeze bottle. And I had to go through that experience to re-engage with some truth that we are so much more than that. And since then, other people have put olive oil in squeeze bottles, bigger brands like California Olive Ranch. And, you know, for us, the next team meeting that we had was let's not focus on what other people are doing that we have done. Let's focus right now on what we have that they don't.

24:42And let's lean into that this year. Let's double down on everything that we know we have that other people do not. And let's focus on creating more things that other people are not expecting. let's innovate faster than people can join on to our packaging movement um and obviously there's a positive out of every single experience to glean i'm making it seem really nice this was not an easy thing to get through there was a lot of crisis pr i mean my uncle did not know about your brand until he texted me the link and was like this seems interesting i mean that's an all press is good press moment right there if I'm counting you know listen there is definitely an argument for that does it help that you're in 9900 stores and you're going to be in 17 ,000 at the end of the year does it help like when you see these like copycats does it kind of help that like kind of won in a way these numbers are undeniable 1100 and up into the right does that help make this copycat culture like do you can you just like block it out we really don't think about it In fact, when we see it, we're like, what's nice about that bottle?

25:52Like, this feels like a nice feature. We're treating it as, you know, how can we improve? But the last thing that we think about right now is squeeze bottles. Squeeze bottle was a day one thing. It's continued to serve us so well. It is a quick way to identify our product on social media. And it's a quick way to feel us in a grocery store that we are different and differentiated. but our team is not thinking about squeeze bottles. We've already done that. We already have that. We're on to the next. I'm really, I really, Andrew, I appreciate this point of view. I think 14 months since I last spoke to you on the podcast, it's like real growth.

26:30And I think at that time, we did talk about the squeeze bottle copycats off mic mostly and you were not in that mindset. Yeah. Yeah, it sucked. It sucked. But I think it came out wiser, more humble, more reserved. and I'm not going to incite the public domain at all. I'm going to email our customers to tell them that we just found an amazing olive oil in Portugal and I'm excited for them to treat that. When we spoke last, you were really adamant that you're an olive oil company and only an olive oil company and you're focusing on two SKUs and some cool collabs, but very small. And is that still the case as we go into 24?

27:07Are you still pretty much a two product brand? To this date, we are still. We have some fun things coming out this year that I wouldn't call evergreen products, but our brand and our platform and our operations are strong enough to say produce 20 ,000 or 30 ,000 of something that is in a different category and see how it goes. We've earned that right, I think, and we'll do it and we'll study. We're going to listen to our consumers. and we do have some really fun stuff coming out in olive oil that will make us more than two skew company but it will uh knock people's socks off for sure um so so listen like we don't have a product development team we haven't gotten there yet we don't have a product development pipeline where we have four different things that have a 12 month lead time that we are working on right now we have a lot of ideas we have a lot of talented people but we are pretty damn focused Like Graza's sizzle and drizzle will be a$140 million business pretty quick.