Season 2, Ep. 8 | Beyond Extra Virgin: The Art and Grit Behind Wildly Virgin Transcript
More Elephant Intro
[00:00:38] Jason Rudman: My guests today on the More Elephant podcast are two entrepreneurs that are rethinking how we think about that beautiful food item called olive oil.
Riley Gibson and Nader Akhnoukh are in two different continents trying to rethink how small artisanal batch production of olive oil will change how we cook, how we think about a different part of the world, and indeed different paths to entrepreneurship in this world that we call More Elephant.
So Riley, Nader, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:16] Riley Gibson: Thanks for having us.
[00:01:17] Jason Rudman: Awesome. This is going be exciting for me. I love olive oil. I love cooking. And Riley and I know each other from a different chapter in our journey. Nader, you and I are getting acquainted, so I'm excited to hear about the origin story, what brought both of you together and, for our listeners, the uniqueness to what you've found in Portugal. Olive trees have existed for two thousand [2,000] years which I didn't know about. So, there's a rich history with Portugal; we're excited to get into that.
I'd love to start with your origin story. What led you to olive oil and how is that connected to who you are and what you do. Nader, let's start with you.
[00:01:59] Nader Akhnoukh: Sure. Yeah. Well, thank you for having us Jason.
I think, you know, as many good origin stories go, it wasn't a direct path. It's been sort of a winding road to get here. My background is in tech, in startups. I've started three different tech startups in very different fields.
My first company was Tamale Software. We made research management software for the finance industry and I built that company over six years or so.
All of my businesses have been in very different fields and that's intentional because what interests me is the learning process and I can get bored if I spend too much time on the same thing.
My next business was Kapost. It was software for marketing teams to help them organize their process and create content, distribute content, analyze it. And my first company was in Boston, Kapost started in San Francisco and then moved to Boulder, and that's where I connected with Riley. And then, my third software company was called Onward; it was transportation for the elderly, assisted transportation so kind of Uber for seniors and Riley, strangely, also ended up in the senior software category, which is a funny coincidence.
And then, my family had been planning a move to Portugal, pre-COVID and then COVID hit. And I was in Portugal, on kind of a scouting trip, when Trump closed the border and my kids were still in the U.S. and we had to rush back and, get there, but decided to kind of push through with the move.
And the move was really just about a family adventure. I thought my kids were at a good age to explore the world and, doing things in tech, it's not too difficult to do it from different spots. So yeah, we decided to take this leap of faith and moved here [Portugal]. [We] didn't know anybody but found a very warm country and community and kids really settled into a school that they're happy with and that was all great.
But, I started to feel a little disconnected. My whole professional network was in the U.S. and I was on Zooms all day, and I wanted to do something a little bit more tied to the country I was living in.
The other piece was, you know, I spent my whole career in tech and I love tech. I've got no problem with tech but just a lot of hours at the computer screen. And I wanted to try doing something a little bit more visceral, a little bit more tangible…
The path to olive oil was kind of a meandering one. Olive oil is central to everything in Portugal. Every table you sit down to at a restaurant has olive oil. Olive oil and bread are the most central things. So I just started to learn more about it. As you mentioned, these thousand year old trees, which just blew my mind thinking about what they've been through.
I started learning about the health benefits which are still not fully understood, but they're incredible. The whole Mediterranean diet, which is, you know, all the range—that's really an olive oil diet. I started to visit farms and producers and got really excited about it.
I learned that Portuguese olive oil is still made in a traditional way, which is quite different from the rest of the world. The rest of the world has become huge conglomerates and machine harvested and big business. These are still made by families.
I think Riley introduced me to this book, Extra Virginity, which is a great read for your listeners, even if you're not super into olive oil. It's just an interesting story about the underside, the underbelly of the olive oil world and how the mafia is still
[00:05:48] Jason Rudman: Hang on, there's an underbelly to the, that's…
[00:05:49] Nader Akhnoukh: Oh, oh, there is, yeah.
[00:05:51] Jason Rudman: …that feels quite nefarious and insidious.
[00:05:53] Nader Akhnoukh: We'll get there. Yeah. And I learned how, you know, the way it's done in Portugal is quite different from that. And it's still smaller places making it for their communities and very little of it's exported.
And so, Riley and I, we were catching up periodically and one of our catchups, I learned that he was also falling down the olive oil rabbit hole and I thought, you know what, one of my favorite people to work with is also getting into this kind of bizarre world. I was like, okay, we gotta do something here.
[00:06:22] Jason Rudman: Well listen, that is a perfect segue to understanding how Riley fell into the olive oil rabbit hole as you called it.
So Riley, in my mind, what Nader just took us through, is from a brand perspective, a series of More Elephant moments that move somebody from tech to olive oil in the U.S. to Portugal.
So how did you, the rabbit hole of olive oil, how did you find your path?
[00:06:47] Riley Gibson: Yeah, so I mean, in a lot of ways, again, my path echoes Nader's—obviously not the international move. But, started in technology, a number of different technology startups. I was the product guy. Nader was the CTO. So that's where we really got to know each other well and knew we worked really well together.
And then after Kapost, kinda went our separate ways. I also went to a company that was working with elderly adults and seniors, mostly helping them basically stay in their homes and make housing more affordable. So, we were pairing people with roommates, housemates as we called them, and really trying to figure out how we could do that safely and effectively so that homeowners could earn extra income and really cut back on isolation that often happens later in life.
So that kind of echoes Nader's path with Onward. I think a lot of that was coming from a place of I love technology—how can I use technology to really help and use technology for good?
And Nader, I think you introduced me to the idea of Ikigai, right? Of finding that center of what you're good at, what the world needs, what brings you joy, what is the intersection of all of those things. And, I think a lot of my career has just been exploring different facets of that and narrowing in on what makes me happy and what I think the world could use.
And, after being in tech so long, I had the same kind of calling as Nader —I'd really love to do a physical product, something that I can bring home and my kids can taste and they can understand what I do.
And, that whole thread of thinking was happening through COVID. All of us were doing a lot of soul searching at that time. And, as part of that exploration, I knew I needed to just start reading and exploring and getting back to hobbies and interests and tinkering. I had kinda lost that and I was feeling very one-dimensional. And I think I'm best when I'm just consuming as many random things as possible, and that helps me find and connect dots.
And so, I've always loved olive oil. I got that book, Extra Virginity, during COVID and reading that book, I felt totally cheated. All this time, I thought I had been having olive oil, but a lot of it isn't even extra virgin olive oil. It's cut with different things. It's blended, it says it's from Italy, but it's from all over.
You know, you feel like you're close to something and then you realize that there's all these layers between you and that thing, and you don't really know what's in the bottle. You don't really know what's behind the label. And a lot of it is just stories, but not reality.
And so I found olive oil lovers dot com [oliveoillovers.com] and you can buy direct olive oil from all over. And so I just started playing and it was like this whole world opened up of, like wine or whiskey, all these different dimensions. And I didn't even know about different varietals and blends and single varietals. This whole world opened up and it was completely different than what you get in the grocery store and I just found that fascinating.
So, this is about the time that Nader and I reconnected and it was sort of this lightning moment of Portugal's incredible, and everyone's really interested in Portugal, it's sort of rising in the minds of a lot of different people. It's unknown for olive oil—Italy, Spain, Greece, that's what people know when they think about olive oil. But Portugal still does it in this traditional way.
We could actually meet these farmers and one olive oil could be from one farmer, and we could tell that farmer story. You hear about the estates—it's from this estate from the eighteen [18] hundreds—but you don't hear about the farmers. And, they're the scientists, they're the artists, they're the craftspeople.
And a lot of my journey, I am happiest when I'm working with designers or engineers or people that are just great at a craft. And this would be a chance to meet and learn from these incredible people that have been making olive oil for generations. So that just all became so interesting.
And in my mind there is a need, there is a problem where the olive oil we are used to consuming is often not what we think it is. People are trying to get closer to their food, people are interested in Portugal. Those stars just seemed to line up and we could really create something cool here and give other people the same aha moment we had when we first tried, like Portuguese olive oil or real olive oil that was pressed really recently. So yeah, it was kind of a meandering path, but one that was around following passion and then where that passion intersected with opportunity and potential need.
[00:11:55] Jason Rudman: That was awesome. Right? So now we're going to go backwards to go forwards. That was brilliant. So, as I listened to both of you, a few things—you both shared a couple of words or sentiments that I think…that's the connection.
You talked about a pivotal change in life. I think the pandemic taught us that if I were to boil it down to its essence, and we should strive for joy. I mean, we should strive for joy in our lives, right?
And I think we get caught up so much in this path that is, it's a path, but when you get the opportunity to take a step back, which I think the pandemic did, it allows us to reassess and rethink what it is that’s important to us.
You also talked about storytelling. Riley, you started to mention storytelling. So there's a path there to take about this unknown land of olive oil, right? This unknown land of olive oil, two thousand [2,000] year old olive trees. As you mentioned, Riley, we usually associate olive oil with Italy, Greece. I do associate wine though Nader with Portugal. They do pretty good wine.
[00:12:53] Nader Akhnoukh: They do, yup, that's right.
[00:12:55] Jason Rudman: And then a series of More Elephant moments, as we talked about that at its heart to me, is design thinking. So, Riley, you and I know each other from a different life. Nader, you've built products like software products from a tech perspective. And, that to me, usually starts with design thinking. There's a problem that we're looking to solve and both of you fell in love with a problem, which was, you've got this artisanal small batch production that you found out about. The world doesn't know about it that triggered both of you to say, what can we do about it?
So Nader, you get to Portugal, you read a book, and you've never been in the olive oil business before. So take our audience through that journey. Again, you're disconnected from the U.S. because you're in Portugal, post pandemic. Where does that journey begin?
[00:13:48] Nader Akhnoukh: I really just started trying to learn as much as I could, so I consumed everything on the internet I could find about olive oil production and storage, handling and the different factors that go into great olive oil.
And I started traveling all over the country. So, I spent a lot of time in my car. I went down to the Alentejo and then the Algarve, which is all the way south, and then different spots in central Portugal. And I networked to different producers and visited the producers, spent some time with them and learned how their production process went.
I briefly explored actually setting up a farm, you know, buying a farm or starting a farm and actually growing olive trees. And there's a part of me that still romanticizes that but farming is a very difficult business. You have one harvest a year, so you get paid basically once a year. And there's a lot you can't control, like how was the rainfall? And so, I didn't want my business to be a farming business, but I would still love to get into that side of it.
And then, I wanted to get better at tasting olive oil and learning more deeply how to produce it so I enrolled in a program, it's called the ES AO [ESAO]. It's the oldest olive oil school in the world. It's based in Spain. And I took an olive oil sommelier course there, it's a three month program that teaches how to be a sommelier, so I'm a certified olive oil sommelier now, and also learned about the production process as well.
So yeah, that was sort of the journey, just to feel like I could legitimately do this side of the business. There's a natural division, geographically, between Riley and I, so we collaborate on almost everything, but I handle more of the operational sourcing side of things. It was important that our olive oil that we were sourcing was really high quality and I needed to be able to judge then.
[00:15:56] Jason Rudman: And so Riley, to Nader's point, you're on two different continents. How do you reflect on getting grounded? So you read the book, you've always loved olive oil. I've read books. I love certain things, but that's very, very different than saying, Hey, this is my joy path. This is what I'm about to do.
How did you connect to the path that Nader just talked about? And then you also started to talk about the stories of farmers, right? There's a richness to the stories of farmers, given how production happens in Portugal. So if you could just describe the types of farmers that you work with, how does that work? What are the logistics in terms of bringing a bottle of Wildly Virgin Olive Oil to the table?
[00:16:38] Riley Gibson: Yeah. So I think where I picked things up with Nader, to your point, I read the book. I had been trying a bunch of different olive oils from all over the world. And then, Nader started sending me Portuguese olive oil and I continued, like Nader, I wanted to read everything I could on olive oil, the process, the market, just talking to people.
Like you'd say, have you read this book? Do you know what's happening in olive oil? What grocery store olive oil often is? And, you just see the light bulbs go off and now they were really curious to learn more. It's just such a interesting story. So, I think that was like motivating for me.
And then, getting these olive oils from Nader, I did a bunch of tastings— would have people over, would put out a bunch of different olive oils and put out the Portuguese ones and people would always pick the Portuguese ones. And that was fascinating to me, even blind tastings. And I think the other thing that was really interesting about it was, you could see again the light bulb going off for people. I had no idea there was this much range and variety; like, this one is so spicy, this one is like butter.
People were using words that used to describe wine or whiskey. It's like, why isn't there that same nuance and interest in olive oil? I was really curious about that question.
The other thing was talking about the story and the farmers. Nader, you used the word visceral earlier, there was something incredible and magical about getting a bottle from Nader and having it in my hand, and then him sending me a picture—oh, here's the family that's making it. Look at this thousand year old tree and I'm like, you know, those pictures, those people, that's this bottle is them and it's their craft. And that directness, that connectivity was just very powerful. And that's happening all over food, right?
People want to feel more connected to where their food comes from, who it comes from. But that moment I think was really interesting to really say, the closer we can get someone to the producer and the actual photos of the trees where these olives come from, and the more we can show harvest and then have that bottle in your hand a couple months later from Portugal. There was something incredibly special about that.
And, it was really intimidating. Nader and I had never imported anything in our lives, so it was pretty intimidating thinking about how do we even start?
But, I think the product and technology side had really taught us to just shrink the problem and define a clear path forward. Like, how small can we make this to start? It doesn't have to be grocery stores and insane logistics. It can be finding a few producers, just getting a couple pallets over. Part of the story is the small batch nature; these farms can't produce a thousand liters or ten thousand [10,000] liters.
We're gonna be buying in small batches anyways, so let's just shrink it down and just do one and we'll figure it out along the way. So I think there were a lot of interesting technology lessons of how do we shrink this down, just start and put one foot in front of the other and we'll figure it out as we go. And there were certainly a lot of stumbling blocks along the way. We had a lot of starts and stops, moments where we thought it won't work or we're going to be delayed, but, you problem solve. And we got it here.
It had its own British Airways flight out from Portugal. It was on a commercial flight and we picked it up in a huge rental truck, and I didn't even know you're required at the airport to have a dock height truck and all your own equipment to take it off. But, you just work through that stuff.
[00:20:46] Jason Rudman: So I promise everybody listening that you weren't playing to the crowd when you said it was on a British Airways plane.
[00:20:53] Riley Gibson: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:20:54] Jason Rudman: You know. I appreciate your choice of carrier. So a few thoughts, right?
The inherent quality of what you're delivering. You said this well, which is about small batch, and you started small, and I think for the audience appreciating, you had said, we're not harvesting in farms and locations where you're going to get thousands of liters of olive oil, because that's not what we're actually trying to solve. We're actually swimming in a very, very different direction from what you typically see on your local supermarket or store shelves.
What I'd love to do is talk a little bit more about source to kitchen table. If you could go a little deeper in terms of find a location, a farmer, and then the end state is this perfectly produced, high-quality olive oil. So, how do you get from source to table?
[00:21:49] Nader Akhnoukh: So, the first step is finding the farmers and producers. So that's a lot of networking.
I meet a producer and ask them who else they would recommend and I go meet those people. And, through my olive oil program, I met some really high quality producers and they connected me to people that they know. And so, at this point, I've got a decent network of producers in Portugal and then it's harvest time right now, which is exciting.
I've been visiting some of the producers harvesting right now and just seeing it in action. In the latter half of this month, I will begin tasting some of the fresh oils and then deciding which ones we want to be part of our next batches.
We started really small as Riley mentioned. What we have in market right now is a single small batch [and] two or three in the next go around to really illustrate the diversity of olive oil.
This is something that very few people are familiar with, but you can taste different olive oils from Portugal. There's a Galega varietal, which is very smooth and buttery, and there's a Cobrançosa which is like spicy and burns the back of your throat. And they're very different. They have different uses. So part of what we're trying to do is educate people on this beautiful substance and all the variety there.
So, I'll taste a bunch and try to pick out some that are different and then, we will work with the producers to bottle. We have a bottle supplier, we have labels that we need to produce—we're working with a really talented designer who's helping us with our labels and our branding.
There's the little cork top that goes in the bottle. You know, there's all these little pieces that go into the finished product. There's the shrink wrap that goes on top of the cork, on top of the bottle, so all of these pieces need to come together. We are bottling in Portugal because there are excellent bottling facilities. I think at some point—this is a TBD about the future— we might centralize our bottling in the U.S. so that if we were working with eight or nine or ten [10] different producers, it would make sense to just bulk ship the olive oil and then bottle everything the same way. And then you need to ship it. And then there's a whole complicated customs process and import/export process.
We've learned a lot about the FDA and how to properly get things registered and nutrition label requirements and...
[00:24:33] Riley Gibson: UPCs and...
[00:24:35] Nader Akhnoukh: Yeah, it's a whole world that neither Riley or I knew anything about.
[00:24:39] Jason Rudman: So you mean there is no FDA playbook for how you get olive oil into the US from Portugal?
[00:24:45] Nader Akhnoukh: The FDA, I would say, has wonderful intentions, but I think much of the actual processes maybe directly from the 1950s or something. So, it is very difficult to work with the FDA; there isn't really a playbook.
There are requirements for olive oil as far as labeling goes, but one of the challenges was the FDA has to register the exporter. So, our producers have to get registered with the FDA and you know, these are smaller producers that don't have any sort of tech or legal team or anything. So, we help them with that process.
And, there's been some interesting stumbling blocks and learnings on my part working with the producers. Doing business in Portugal is quite different than doing business in the U.S., where there's a contract that you'd have in place as soon as you agree on anything. That wasn't really the case in Portugal; it's much more handshakes.
We had one producer early on, we really liked his olive oil and were excited to work with him. When we were ready with our bottles and labels, I thought we had a sort of a handshake agreement in place. It turned out he had sold all of his olive oil and didn't have any left for us!! So, learning to navigate the world of Portuguese olive oil.
Once you get through the customs piece, you can export either via boat or air. The boat's a little slower and cheaper. Another learning is that if you have really high quality olive oil, you don't want to ship it by boat in the summer because those containers get quite hot, which degrades the olive oil. And then, it gets to Riley.
[00:26:26] Riley Gibson: Yeah, and then I've, just been that we wanted...
[00:26:30] Jason Rudman: Riley, you meet the plane or the boat.
[00:26:32] Riley Gibson: Yeah, yeah,
[00:26:35] Jason Rudman: You back the truck up and then say, okay, what do we do?
[00:26:39] Riley Gibson: Yeah. Yeah. Literally, so many things could have gone wrong that day. And our story comes down to always having someone in the passenger seat that has experience and knows—like, finding a good import broker, working with great shipping companies. I have someone here that helped out picking the shipment up, who's done a lot of that in the past. So, I think having someone riding shotgun that knows what they're doing has saved us in a lot of instances.
We got to the airport, got everything, all four pallets in the truck, so it's twenty six hundred [2,600] bottles. It was four pallets. And we're driving down the freeway, just hearing things clinking, just praying that nothing's breaking. Then we got it to the facility where we're storing it.
And now I've just been taking it. We're selling primarily direct to consumer through our website and learning Shopify and all of that has been a true joy. It's a great tool. That's been kind of the easy part. That's the part that's very familiar. What's been really cool is individually packaging each of these and sending it out.
I had gotten to a place in my career where it was more working with larger teams; you become more disconnected from the individual customer, individual work. I can't be doing the packing forever and we have a plan to help scale that over time, but there's something really cool about being this close to what's happening and being able to add special little things in the packaging.
This is another place where we can iterate, you know, this piece is too small. Let's change this up. We've been able to be so hands-on changing the packaging, which is part of the story. The story is as important as the oil itself. Every little detail of the packaging is very important to deliver that story and that experience.
I've just found…I've never done something in my career where it's like doing the same thing over and over and over again and learning how to get a millionth of a percent better every time you do it. Just the millionth of a percent that you can get that takes something from incredible to amazing. I never thought I'd really find that in the packaging experience, but, you know, stamping the boxes and wrapping the bottles individually and the tissue paper aligning it so the bottle numbers face up. Like there's all these things that go into it that have been really satisfying to find that joy and that repetition and that the just craft of packaging.
[00:29:18] Jason Rudman: I have my bottle as you know. So first off, thank you. And what I love about what you both just talked about there is design thinking all the way through whether it be the logistics of getting something from Europe to the U.S. and the flourish of packaging. Then Nader, you talked about definite purpose to the design of the bottle, the label of the bottle, the cork, the additional elements.
So talk us through the purposefulness of the design of the bottle. I have to believe that that is connected to the journey that the olive oil has taken from source to table. So could you just talk a little bit about the presentation of the olive oil and why that is important to the overall story?
[00:30:00] Riley Gibson: Yeah. So I think we have to have the highest quality olive oil or it's a non-starter; that is critical but we were feeling really confident about that.
It then became how do we find a bottle and a packaging experience and a brand that honestly does these farmers justice and gives a feeling of closeness and almost rawness? And, this is where we took a lot of different paths and it came down to just trusting our gut on what felt right.
There were a lot of directions we could have gone, but they felt too polished almost or they didn't echo or reference things that were key to Portugal. And so, we went through a lot of different iterations. We started zeroing in on this idea that the brand, the bottle, the experience should have a directness and a rawness to it. Because these are small batches, we can do things like the individually bottled or numbered bottles and things like that that just add the special touch.
We ended up finding an amazing Heritage Inc. illustrator and that's when things really started to click—how do we take iconic things from Portugal or iconic things from each farm and let that tell the story in the label. He did a logo that all just hand ink and there's just a rawness and a roughness to it that we really liked.
Then we found a bottle that has all this texture to it that just really felt like it told the story of Portugal and how there is beauty and imperfection. So many bottles you see, they are so perfect and they're beautiful but then you see this one that is raw and has all these imperfections on it and that clicked. Pairing that with the cork and Portugal, as the largest exporter of cork, corks everywhere. That's when it all started to come together. I feel we've gotten close to that point where it is this imperfect but beautiful bottle and package that tells that story of the farmers and of Portugal and has a little fun too. The first bottle has the octopus on the side. It can't all be too serious.
[00:32:22] Jason Rudman: Yeah. Well, so as somebody that unwrapped a bottle. Job well done. Seriously. So we took it to the kitchen table. I saw it. I was like, oh, this is what Riley had promised. And just the crazy, for me, what I noticed was the actual use of cardboard, the inlay, right? And just the reveal of the bottle. I'm a customer of one, but my goodness, you did a great job. Truly, truly. Because I think that that's part of the feeling, right? You're evoking a feeling when you open up that bottle and you talked about the roughness, this individuality of the bottle and that was also the thing that struck me. I felt I was getting an individual bottle of olive oil.
[00:33:01] Riley Gibson: Mm-hmm.
[00:33:02] Jason Rudman: Not a mass produced bottle. That bottle didn't feel like it had been curated and there were twenty six hundred [2,600] other bottles that actually looked like that. So for me, yes. That's how it felt when I unwrapped the box.
[00:33:12] Riley Gibson: Thank you. That's great to hear. And that was a really hard thing to find and balance. We started out thinking when one of these producers gives olive oil to their neighbors, what does that look like? Should this be just a cardboard container with sharpie on it kind of thing? Should we go that raw?
Some of that felt not curated enough or didn't give justice to how premium and amazing this oil is. Then we moved to another direction that was so pristine and clean but that didn't feel right because it felt overproduced and now it feels we've lost the directness to that producer.
So, there was a ton of trial and error in that and finding the right balance of the rawness and maintaining the premium, feel and the beauty of it.
[00:34:05] Jason Rudman: Yeah. Nader, you mentioned at the beginning when you were talking about your origin story, as you dug in the health benefits of a Mediterranean diet. So I'd love to go there for a moment as well. And in that context, why is what you're doing important?
[00:34:22] Nader Akhnoukh: Yeah. So it's a great question. It's interesting because olive oil has these incredible health benefits. Like it has antioxidants, there's these magical compounds called polyphenols, where all the health benefits come from. They've done these studies, but they're still uncovering it.
There's anti-cancer properties, there's all this stuff going on. And what's interesting specifically to what we're doing is the polyphenols, where all this magic exists, are only available in really high quality olive oils. The olive oil that's on your supermarket shelf, they probably promote this, but it doesn't actually have those same health benefits or very much reduced. So, that's a really interesting aspect of this is that the higher quality the oil is, the healthier it is and different varietals have different fluctuations in these amounts of polyphenols and when you harvest makes a big difference.
If you harvest earlier, when the olives are still somewhat green, you get less of a yield of olive oil. So, if all olive oil is just a commodity and priced the same, it doesn't make sense to harvest earlier, but you end up with more of these polyphenols, so you’ve got a greater health benefit and you also capture more of the nuanced flavor that is specific to that varietal.
If you harvest really late olive oils from the south of Portugal and north of Portugal will taste the same, but if you harvest earlier, they're quite different. So, we look for producers that typically harvest early and really are focused on the quality and the nuance of flavor and the health benefits and they all sort of go together at the cost of yield.
[00:36:17] Jason Rudman: But that’s what makes this special, right?
[00:36:19] Nader Akhnoukh: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:36:20] Jason Rudman: That's the trade off.
So we've had a few entrepreneurs on season one of More Elephant podcast. And I always like to ask this question—somebody's listening to this…got a product, an idea that they'd like to produce. Both of you have gone through this journey from pandemic to reading a book to we'll start an olive oil business on two different continents.
So really a two-part question—where would you encourage them to start and then how would you encourage people that so often get stuck with the the idea, but it never seems to go anywhere.
[00:36:55] Nader Akhnoukh: I think something, a real benefit of coming to this from a product background is, I think Riley and I have a lot of experience in how can we just produce something that is small but valuable and then get really good at gathering feedback and iterating.
And this is actually one of the most difficult things, I'd say, about this shift from software into physical product because, in the software world, you have an idea and you can get an MVP out in a week and you can have five of your friends play with it and give you feedback. That's not at all the case with olive oil. So, I think that was a little bit of a struggle, I'd say, with Riley and I, in figuring out how to navigate this.
We want to move quickly and get feedback as quickly as possible but what does that MVP look like in a food world? Obviously the product needs to be exceptional, but then the branding needs to be great as well, right? So that's a long way of saying it depends for your person out there who wants to come to market with something. I think it depends on the category. I would spend some time trying to figure out what is the smallest, quickest thing you can put together that is actually valuable and that you can get some feedback on and iterate. And it's really different across different types of products.
[00:38:19] Riley Gibson: Yeah, I was going to say the same thing— it's so easy to start with an idea or a problem and just add to it in your head, kind of grow it. And I think if Nader and I started down the path of we want to make this mass production type of thing, then you're into a whole new category of logistics and complexity.
I think being really purposeful about shrinking it down and keeping it small and contained versus letting it sort of continue to grow because I feel like that's when you get stuck is just you're doing all this analysis and finding every problem that will exist.
I think we had the confidence that problems that would come up, [we] would be able to figure out along the way. And that's where there was this perfect alignment of trying to do small batch, we're trying to work with individual producers that aligns with what we can do in terms of delivering one small batch to the U.S. and seeing how that goes and working from there. So I think we are able to find that path. The advice I'd give people is just try and keep it small or shrink it down.
[00:39:27] Jason Rudman: I think there's also a remarkableness, as I've listened into both of you, sharing your sides of the story in that as you start to reveal the story and the journey that you're on, you find expertise that also wants to be part of that journey. That gets excited that you're excited about doing something that is very, very different and that inspires people to want to help you and share in your success.
You mentioned logistics, help, Nader, I've got to believe that when you got to Portugal, part of your ability, you became an olive oil sommelier. The fact that there's a course right and that opens up doors and I think people, as they listen to the story, are appreciative that it is so rooted in Portugal, the support of the farmer, and enabling that beautiful gift to be experienced by many more people around the globe.
That creates this crescendo of help and willingness to put you in touch with other people to keep building.
[00:40:25] Nader Akhnoukh: Yeah, absolutely. And it's been really fun on the Portuguese side, telling the story. People are excited to help because naturally, the Portuguese are very proud of their olive oil, but very little of it is exported. And it feels a little bit like a secret, you know?
And then when I tell people about what we're doing and really celebrating the Portuguese side of it, we're celebrating the farmers, the regions, the olive varietals and telling the story of Portugal through the lens of olive oil. That gets people really excited and people are eager to help out however they can.
So, we're working with a Portuguese videographer and we're working with a Portuguese recipe developer and photographer and all these people are super excited about what we're doing and want to be part of it.
[00:41:18] Jason Rudman: For each of you, what's the one thing you didn't know about yourself, that as you've gone through this journey, it became abundantly clear that that's either a superpower or that's where I actually wanted to take the next chapter of my life in the context of Wildly Virgin .
[00:41:35] Riley Gibson: Yeah, I think for me, this experience and going back to when I first started my career, I felt like I had gotten away from that true sort of raw problem solving and really being fully accountable for something, being successful or not, and needing to figure out everything about. There's Nader and I, but then it's just on us to figure it out.
I think it's been nice to come back to that and remember maybe that most everything has a solution. It just takes some digging and figuring out.
And there's a lot of things that I could easily get intimidated by, like with importing and FDA stuff. But you just start to figure it out. And I think that muscle may have atrophied a little bit over time. And so it's been really cool to come back to that and rebuild some of the confidence in that muscle. And so that's been cool to kind of reclaim, I guess. It's definitely not a superpower. I think everyone has it, but it's just, you can get far away from that and not really remember that these things that sometimes scare you, you can just stare in the face and figure out.
[00:42:48] Jason Rudman: Yeah. I love that. Nader?
[00:42:51] Nader Akhnoukh: I would piggyback on that a little bit, maybe from a slightly different angle, in that there are moments that are not super infrequent when you're starting from zero where you can feel really intimidated by the magnitude of what lies ahead of you.
And something I've been really encouraged about this time is I've sensed in myself that I've done this a few times now, and I have more confidence in my entrepreneurial ability than I've had in the past. I know the road will be hard, but as Riley said, something seems insurmountable and you just have to sort of break it down and figure out the best path forward.
And I really appreciate Riley's collaboration in moments like that. I feel that if we can just keep getting feedback, keep iterating and keep improving on what we're doing, we can turn this into something quite special and I'm excited for that.
[00:43:53] Jason Rudman: Well, from me to you as a consumer, it is special. And I don't say that just because you agreed to take us through the journey. How do people find out more about each of you and Wildly Virgin?
[00:44:07] Riley Gibson: Yeah. So I mean, we're doing everything through the website, so wildly virgin dot com [wildlyvirgin.com]. We'll be adding more and more to it in terms of recipes, and we've got a really cool video coming up that dives deep into João, our first producer and harvest. So we're really looking forward to that.
And then slowly but surely we're talking to small specialty stores and wine shops who are interested. So hopefully we'll have some physical presence as well.
[00:44:34] Jason Rudman: Awesome.
[00:44:35] Nader Akhnoukh: We are wildly virgin on all the social platforms.
[00:44:40] Jason Rudman: Wildly virgin on all of the social platforms. It's this been a joy. Thank you. What a great story about taking a chance on a product and moving family to Europe and, in a life-changing moment for most of the world around the pandemic, bringing great stories to the kitchen table of many people here in the U.S. and throughout the world.
So, thanks again for the time. Really, really appreciate it and lots of future success on the company and the dream…
[00:45:11] Nader Akhnoukh: Thank you, Jason.
[00:45:12] Riley Gibson: Thank you so much, Jason, and so good to see you.
[00:45:14] Nader Akhnoukh: Yeah.
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