Olive Oil Is Showing Up in Some Unexpected Places

I've started seeing olive oil in places that never used to carry it. Nordstrom, fancy boutiques, shops that never used to sell anything you could cook with, and there it is, a beautiful bottle sitting on a table near the register with the other gifts. I love it. It feels like olive oil is becoming a gift the way wine has been for a long time, except it's so much more accessible. You don't have to know anything about wine, or worry about whether the person you're giving it to drinks, and almost everyone cooks.

I've also had a little worry in the back of my mind about some of those bottles, and I'll get to why at the end.

Olive oil as a host gift

The UK seems to be a step ahead of us on this one. In late 2024 the British grocery chain Waitrose put out its yearly food and drink report and said olive oil "may be replacing wine as a gift to offer hosts," pointing to a House & Garden article on the same idea. Their buyer also said sales of premium extra virgin olive oil were up 15% that year. By January of this year The Week had rounded up a whole wave of British coverage under the headline "The olive oil renaissance," including that same Waitrose buyer telling The Telegraph that "premium, pretty and, crucially, ethical brands" had become a "status symbol for our pantries."

Not everyone over there is on board. Debrett's, a 250-year-old British etiquette company, said bringing olive oil "might imply that your host does not have a sufficiently well-resourced kitchen." I mean, maybe, if you bring the exact bottle they already have. But I've never met anyone who was upset to have more good olive oil in their kitchen.

Here in the US it's newer, but food sites have started running the same kind of "bring olive oil instead of wine" pieces, and the reasons make sense to me. A bottle of wine is usually gone in one night (or sits in a cabinet for years if it's not their thing), and a bottle of olive oil gets used for months on eggs, pasta, salads, and bread. It also comes at pretty much any price point, and a good one has a story behind it, the grove and the family and the harvest, which makes it a lot more fun to give.

Why the bottles look so different now

A big part of how olive oil ended up in clothing stores is that the bottles got really, really pretty. For most of my life olive oil was a plain bottle on the bottom shelf next to the vegetable oil, and now there are brands where the bottle is half the reason people buy it.

Graza is probably the one most people know. They launched in January 2022 with two oils in green squeeze bottles, one for cooking and one for drizzling, sold out on the first day, and by 2024 were in more than 13,000 stores in the US. Brightland went in a more artistic direction with bottles that look like something you'd leave out on the counter on purpose.

And then there's Flamingo Estate, which has made a real stir and has done a lot to change how olive oil gets branded. They're a Los Angeles brand that started in 2020 selling boxes of local produce during the pandemic and grew into candles, soaps, and pantry goods, and you can now find the brand at Nordstrom and Bloomingdale's and their olive oil at Anthropologie and goop. What I was happy to learn is that the oil is the real deal. Their Heritage oil is made by the Ojai Olive Oil Company, a family olive farm in Ojai, California, from Arbequina, Leccino, and Pendolino olives that are picked by hand and pressed right after harvest, and it comes in dark glass. Martha Stewart said last year that it's the only olive oil she uses at home. I love seeing a California grower get that kind of attention because a brand knew how to tell their story well.

I think the design is doing a lot of the introducing for us right now. Most of us didn't grow up with olive oil as part of everyday life the way families in Spain, Italy, Greece, or Morocco did. A pretty bottle gets someone to pick it up, and then once they actually taste what's inside, a lot of them are hooked.

Where you'll find it now

If you've been noticing this too, here's where it's been turning up:

Department stores and fashion shops. Brands that started with candles and skincare are bringing their pantry goods along with them, so olive oil is showing up in the home and gift sections of department stores and online fashion shops like FWRD.

Home and gift boutiques. Anthropologie, goop, and a lot of small local shops now keep a bottle or two by the register, usually in a gift set with vinegar, salt, or a little dipping dish.

Big-box stores. The design-focused brands aren't only in boutiques. Graza started out selling online, landed at Whole Foods about a year after launch, and has since rolled out to Target and Walmart, so a lot of people are trying a finishing oil for the first time on a regular grocery run.

Coffee shops, for a little while. Starbucks launched Oleato, their olive oil coffee drinks, in Italy in February 2023 and in the US that spring. They pulled it from US and Canadian stores in late 2024, but for about a year and a half you could get olive oil in your latte, which I still think about.

Your friends' tables. This is the one I care about most. When someone sets out a bowl of good oil with bread instead of butter, or brings a bottle to a holiday party, that's how most of us will actually get introduced to it. I've seen it happen at the tastings I've hosted for friends and family. People are nervous at first, then curious, and then they're fully into it and comparing notes with each other. It's so fun.

A note on freshness

Here's what makes me a little nervous. Olive oil isn't like wine, it doesn't get better sitting in the bottle. It's at its best in the months after it's pressed and slowly loses flavor from there, and heat, light, and air all speed that up. An Australian study tracked 882 bottles of extra virgin olive oil over three years and found that warm storage, air, and light (both sunlight and regular fluorescent store lighting) each made the oil go rancid faster, and light also broke down its antioxidants. Their advice to stores was to keep olive oil below about 77°F and away from light and the heat from display lamps.

A grocery store with a busy oil aisle goes through bottles quickly. A clothing boutique that ordered a case of gift sets for the holidays might not, and nobody working there was necessarily taught to think about a sunny front window or a warm spotlight. The brand can do everything right, dark glass, careful pressing, all of it, and then the bottle spends a couple months next to a window display. When I went through my defect certification I was horrified to find out that most of the oil in my own pantry (not the olive oil) was rancid, and ever since then rancid oil stands out to me everywhere, including at restaurants. I'd hate for someone's first really nice bottle to be one that sat in the sun too long.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't buy olive oil at a boutique. Just pick the bottle up and check a couple of things first:

• Look for a harvest date, not just a best-by date, and pick the most recent one you can find. On store shelves this time of year that's usually last season's harvest, with the brand-new harvest just starting to come in (more on that in The New Harvest).
• Choose dark glass or a tin over clear glass when you can.
• Skip the bottle in the window. If there's one out on display and more on a shelf in the back, ask for one from the back.
• Tell them to open it! I had a bottle of olive oil in my pantry for years that I'm pretty sure I never opened, and I know I'm not the only one. Good olive oil is meant to be used, so if you're giving one, tell them not to save it.

If you're giving olive oil this year

If you're bringing olive oil to someone this holiday season, add a little note about where it's from and how to try it first. My favorite is the simplest thing I know, a bowl of big white beans with a drizzle of good olive oil and a sprinkle of coarse salt. Just trust me. Or a piece of good bread and some flaky salt works too.

And if you really want to make an evening of it, give two or three different oils together and taste them side by side (here's how I host a tasting). That's how I fell in love with olive oil in the first place, and it's still my favorite way to share it.