We didn't plan to start an olive oil company.

I've always been a little obsessed with olive trees.

Hi, I'm Jake. And I'll admit it: The first time I ever saw an olive tree, I climbed through a fence in Italy just to get to it. That should tell you everything.

From there, Andrea and I kept finding excuses to go back to Italy. Every trip, the olive trees were the thing I couldn't stop noticing. Silver-green branches along every road. Oil on every table. Trees older than most countries, still bearing fruit.

On one of those trips, we ended up somewhere we'd never heard of: Susafa, a working masseria deep in the Sicilian countryside, an hour from anywhere, golden hills in every direction.

Then they poured us the oil.

I remember it exactly. Fresh bread, a bottle with no fancy label, and that first taste. Vibrant. Grassy. A peppery kick at the back of the throat.

Andrea and I looked at each other with the same thought: what have we been buying our whole lives?

So we stayed.

So we stayed longer than we planned. We asked a hundred questions. We learned how the family farms here: organically, sustainably, olives hand-picked at peak ripeness and cold-pressed within 24 hours.

They told us about a grove of over 10,000 trees an hour away. I read the book on the history of Susafa's land cover to cover. We cooked with the oil alongside Michelin-caliber chefs and finally understood what "extra virgin" means when it's actually true.

But honestly? The biggest lesson wasn't about oil. It was watching how people live there. Long dinners on the terrace. Bread torn by hand. That liquid gold poured over everything. Nobody rushing. We came home wanting to eat like that, and live like that, every day.

Then we walked into a supermarket back home.

Standing in the olive oil aisle, everything read differently. "Extra virgin." "Cold-pressed." "Product of Italy." We now knew how rarely those words mean what they say.

Most olive oil is a mass-produced commodity: blended, aged, mislabeled, and sold to people who have no way of knowing better. It's one of the most misrepresented products in food. And most people never find out, because they've never tasted the real thing.

We had. And we couldn't unlearn it. We kept thinking about everyone who deserves that first-taste moment we had on the terrace.

So we built the thing we wished existed.

We've spent our careers building brands and businesses, and this was an itch we couldn't ignore. What if you could skip the supermarket shelf entirely and connect straight to the tree?

That's the Olive Tree Club. You adopt a real olive tree in our partner groves. You receive the oil from that harvest. You follow your tree through the seasons. And when you're ready, you can visit it, stay at Susafa, and stand where we stood.

No guessing. No vague labels. No mystery blends. Your tree, your oil.

Was it luck? A little. But look at it now.

Finding Susafa was part luck, we'll admit that. What we built from it wasn't. Today we work hand in hand with our producer partners, track trees through every harvest, and ship grove-to-bottle oil to a club of members that grows every single day.

And somehow our love for olive oil keeps growing right along with it. Parker (our dog) remains neutral, but he's never once turned down bread.