Graza: How a Squeeze Bottle Turned Olive Oil Into a Brand
Founded in 2022, Graza turned single-origin Spanish olive oil into a cult American brand by packaging it in a chartreuse squeeze bottle and launching direct-to-consumer first — reaching a reported $240 million valuation by early 2025 and roughly 28,000 retail doors, on gross sales that climbed from $4m in 2022 to $48m in 2024.
The idea: make a commodity feel like a condiment
Graza was founded in 2022 by Andrew Benin, a veteran of Warby Parker, Casper and Magic Spoon — brands that each made an ordinary category feel designed. His insight with olive oil was deceptively simple: treat it as an everyday condiment, not a precious pantry item. The product is single-varietal Picual oil from Jaén, Spain, sold in a bright chartreuse squeeze bottle borrowed from hot-sauce and professional kitchens.
The range split the use-case in two: 'Drizzle', a finishing oil at around $20, and 'Sizzle', a cooking oil at around $15, later joined by a high-heat 'Frizzle'. That naming does a lot of quiet work — it tells a shopper exactly when to reach for each bottle, turning one commodity into two habits.
The growth: DTC first, retail second — on purpose
Graza sold out in its first week, reportedly generating around $100,000 with no paid advertising. Gross sales then climbed from roughly $4m in 2022 to $19m in 2023 and $48m in 2024, and by early 2025 Forbes and early investor the Cashmere Fund pointed to a $240 million valuation, with Cashmere citing a 10x return on its stake. The brand is now in about 28,000 retailers — Whole Foods, Target, Costco and Walmart among them — and ranks, on Nielsen data, as the fifth-largest national olive oil brand.
The sequencing was strategic, not accidental. Graza built demand direct-to-consumer first, which gave it proof of pull — and far stronger leverage when it walked into retail buyers' offices. Going DTC-first meant it arrived on shelf with an audience already asking for it, the opposite of the usual unknown-brand cold start.
The marketing: give the bottle away and let creators do the talking
Before launch, Graza sent bottles to food creators with no brief and no payment, trusting that a genuinely photogenic product in the right hands would generate its own content. It did. The squeeze bottle is not just packaging; it is the marketing — distinctive on a shelf, distinctive in a feed, and impossible to confuse with a rival.
In January 2026 Graza pushed its boldest move yet: olive-oil-based mayonnaise and aioli, launched at Whole Foods after more than 150 formulations, backed by its largest paid campaign to date including a 'Top Chef' sponsorship and a NASCAR tie-up. The framing — olive oil as the platform, not the product — is where a nine-figure brand either becomes a category or stalls as a one-hit bottle.
Marketing Minute's read
Graza is the clearest modern proof that there is no such thing as a boring category — only boring execution. A commodity with wafer-thin differentiation became a brand on three cheap, repeatable decisions: a packaging format that doubles as media, naming that teaches the shopper how to use the product, and a DTC-first sequence that manufactured demand before retail. None of that required a food-science breakthrough. It required design discipline and patience. That is a playbook an ambitious SME in almost any 'dull' category can study and steal.
Graza is my favourite kind of case study because nothing about olive oil is innovative — the bottle is. They proved that packaging can be your cheapest and best media, and that building demand direct before you chase retail flips all the leverage in your favour. There's no boring category, only boring execution. — Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing
There is no boring category — only boring execution. Distinctive packaging, use-case naming and a demand-first sequence can turn a commodity into a brand.
What's the 'olive oil' in your category — the commodity everyone sells the same way that's waiting for a brand to make it interesting?
If you would like to know more about this topic, please contact us on danieln@merxmarketing.co.uk
Sources: The Foodstack; Forbes; Inc.; Nielsen (company-reported); New Hope Network. Figures as reported; Graza does not publish full accounts.
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Written by Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing Ltd and Marketing Minute
