🍍 Aivalos Natural Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Cold Pressed from Türkiye

I finished my bottle of Aivalos last week! 🍍

This is one of my favorites. It is a cold-pressed EVOO from Ayvalık olives on the Aegean coast (Türkiye). It tastes strongly of pineapple to me. The bottle is also beautiful, and has some internal design so that it pours out in little neat glugs. You will think many times over you are out, only to pause and see that you are not! It almost felt like I had a never-ending, magical bottle. Of course, until it actually was empty. 😂😭

I was not able to find a date on the bottle for when the olives were harvested, but the website says they do an early harvest (by hand) in October, and a later (ripe olive) harvest in December and January.

One interesting observation is that their packaging (and advertising of the oil for Sizzle or specialty cases) parallels Graza. I hypothesized that either the underlying distributor was the same, or it was more of a trend that took off for both. I do not think the first is true, as Graza is from olives sourced and pressed in Jaén, Spain (and the company is based in Brooklyn). For Aivalos, you can easily notice that the bottle has two geographic locations:

My guess is that New Jersey was chosen to create the LLC because it is close to where it gets imported. And I would also guess that it is predominantly sold on Amazon to reduce the need for a middleman. If this might be true (and please comment if you have other ideas) it breaks down the assumption that a product sold on Amazon must be lower quality (an opinion expressed to me by someone earlier this year). It could also be the case that it is more strategic financial decision. I wonder if the US olive oil market is prolific for an international company to sell to, and how it compares to others? I will keep an eye out for other brands produced overseas that might have a similar business setup.

If it is not the case that the produced is shared, I think this means that Graza invented the squeeze bottle, and maybe the product segmentation. Other brands could easily catch on to the trend, see that consumers like the marketing and design, and do the same for their oils. It is easy for me, as a consumer, to look at an overwhelming set of olive oils, see that one is "intended for drizzling on stuff" and choose it because it fits better into the mental map of what I want.

Given that my bottle looks different, at first I thought there might be two companies with the same name. However, I confirmed that the bottle I am showing above is from the same "Aivalos." If you browse company-posted pictures you will find shots with both. I have not tried the squeeze bottle ones yet. Their website has a few pictures of their orchards and factory, and some description (including 500+ year old trees)!

Funnily enough, reading about Ayvalık on Wikipedia, the name of the town translates to "Quince orchard." The region is prominent with pine and olive trees - ~2.5 million olive trees in fact! There is some interesting history with respect to post WWI - apparently the Turkish government brought back 4.5K Greek families to resume olive oil production in the region. I will leave further exploration and reading to you.