The Brooklyn founder who put olive oil in a green squeeze bottle and reached 11,000 stores in three years

The brand in plain terms

Graza was founded by Andrew Benin and Allen Dushi. Benin is the CEO and the public face of the brand. He grew up in Brooklyn and, by his own account, came to olive oil through a 2019 trip to Spain with his now-wife. The trip ended with what he describes as the best olive oil he had ever tasted, the kind that recasts the bottle of supermarket EVOO at home as a different product entirely. He spent the next two years working on the answer to that gap.

The brand's name comes from Grazalema, a small village in the province of Cádiz that was the first stop on Benin's research tour. Graza is shorthand for the place where the project started, not a Spanish word with a clever meaning. That choice — a single specific place, named honestly, rather than a manufactured Italianate brand — is consistent with everything else the brand does.

Graza officially launched on January 11, 2022. The first product was a single 750mL squeeze bottle of cooking-grade extra virgin olive oil called Sizzle. A second SKU, a 500mL finishing oil called Drizzle, followed shortly after. The line now also includes Frizzle (a neutral high-heat oil at 750mL), a mayonnaise made with the brand's own olive oil, glass-bottle versions of the original SKUs, and a line of potato chips fried in 100% extra virgin olive oil.

The squeeze bottle was the product

The single most important decision Graza made was packaging. Most extra virgin olive oil in the United States in 2022 came in dark glass bottles with corks, foil, and label copy borrowed from wine. The unspoken message of that pack format was: this is a fragile, expensive thing, and you should not pour too much of it. The structural result was that even people who owned good olive oil tended to use it sparingly and only for finishing.

Graza put its oil in a green plastic squeeze bottle with a long tapered nozzle, in a flat-bottomed format that lives on a kitchen counter. The pack signals the opposite of the dark-glass-with-cork format. It says: use this every day, on everything, freely. The bottle is designed to be picked up and squeezed with one hand while the other hand is doing something else. That tactile decision is doing as much work for the brand as the oil inside it.

The squeeze bottle also solved a use-case problem the category had quietly accepted. Glass olive oil bottles with pour spouts tend to drip down the side and pool on the shelf. They are a pain to clean and a worse pain to share. The squeeze bottle has a cleaner pour, holds its position on a counter, and survives being handed across a kitchen without ceremony. None of this is glamorous. All of it matters.

“Graza Olive Oil's packaging was the key to building a loyal fan base.”

Drizzle, Sizzle, Frizzle: naming as use-case clarity

The names of the SKUs do a job that most olive oil brands either skip or hand off to back-of-pack copy. “Drizzle” and “Sizzle” are not flavour notes or marketing puns. They are instructions. Drizzle is for finishing, Sizzle is for cooking, and once Frizzle launched it covered the high-heat neutral-oil slot that olive oil traditionally lost to canola and grapeseed. A shopper who knows nothing about olive oil can stand in front of the shelf and choose correctly without reading the back.

That clarity matters because olive oil is one of the categories where consumer confusion is highest. Most shoppers do not know the difference between extra virgin and refined, do not know that a smoke point is a real constraint, and have been trained by years of bad shelf copy to believe that the most expensive bottle on the shelf is the right one for whatever they are about to cook. Graza's naming convention removes the decision from the shopper without lecturing them.

It also lets the brand sell a Trio set — Drizzle, Sizzle, and Frizzle together — as a complete pantry solution rather than a duplicate purchase. That is an unusually elegant way to lift average order value in a category where most brands fight over a single bottle.

Single-farm sourcing, accurately stated

Graza talks publicly about single-origin sourcing. The accurate version of the story, which the brand itself has explained in press interviews, is that every individual production lot of Graza oil comes from one farm in Jaén, Spain — but across lots and over time the brand sources from more than seventy independent farms. The brand will commit to buying roughly 200,000 litres from a single farm to produce a discrete lot that ships as that lot. So an individual bottle is single-farm. The brand as a whole is a curated portfolio of single-farm lots.

That is worth saying out loud because the difference matters for credibility. “Single farm” used as marketing language can collapse into a vague claim if a brand is sourcing freely across a co-op and then printing the most photogenic farm name on the label. Graza's version is more rigorous than that. It is also more demanding to operate, because it requires the brand to maintain working relationships with a long roster of farms and to manage seasonal variance in supply. Reading the structural detail honestly, Graza is closer to a fresh-harvest curator than to a single-estate producer — and that is the more interesting story to tell.

Picual is the dominant olive varietal in the region, which the brand describes on its site with the line that Picual trees can be more than a thousand years old. That is also true. It is the kind of detail that makes the brand feel rooted rather than performative.

From DTC to 11,000 stores

Graza raised approximately $230,000 in initial SAFE notes — primarily via cold outreach using Y Combinator's standard templates — and then roughly $1M from friends, family, angels, and Casper co-founder Neil Parikh ahead of launch. Later in 2022 the brand raised a further $2.8M, bringing total outside capital to just under $3M. There has not been a large institutional venture round since. By mid-2025, Graza was reportedly in more than 11,000 stores and had become the fifth largest national olive oil brand in the United States. Reported 2024 gross sales were approximately $48 million.

The retail expansion path itself is worth walking through because it inverts the standard CPG playbook. The brand launched direct-to-consumer in January 2022. A representative from Whole Foods reached out within the first year about stocking the line, and Graza was on Whole Foods shelves nationwide by the end of 2022. The brand expanded to Target, then to Costco and Walmart. The pattern is one in which the brand was inbound-pulled into retail rather than door-knocking its way in. That is unusual and is a direct consequence of the cultural footprint the brand built early through Instagram, recipe creators, and a New York food-media community that adopted the bottles fast.

What is genuinely instructive here is the capital efficiency. Graza appears to have reached a roughly $240M reported valuation, per public profiles of the company, on less than $3M of outside capital. That is rare. It is rarer still in a category that institutional investors generally consider commoditized.

The line extensions: what is working, what to watch

The original three SKUs — Drizzle, Sizzle, and Frizzle — are doing the heavy lifting and are the structural core of the brand. The line extensions diverge from the core in interesting ways.

The mayo is on-brand. It is a product where the quality of the oil inside the jar materially changes the finished product, and it gives Graza a way to expand into adjacent shelf space without leaving its category logic. A mayonnaise made with the brand's own olive oil is also a product the brand can credibly claim to be better at than anyone else, because it controls the upstream input.

The Ithaca Hummus collaboration from early 2025 is a smart cross-category move that uses Graza's oil as the differentiator in a partner brand's product. It is a more sophisticated version of a co-branding deal than the typical CPG swap because it is structurally rooted in the input, not the logo.

The EVOO potato chips are the line extension most worth watching. The product story is clean — a chip fried in 100% extra virgin olive oil — and the brand has the credibility to make that claim stick. The risk is shelf-set: chips are a different category, a different retailer buyer, and a much more crowded fight. The chip category is also one where margins are tight and brand loyalty is shallow. Graza has the brand permission to play there, but it does not yet have the category infrastructure to win there at scale. This will be a useful test of whether the brand's pull travels into adjacent aisles or whether it stays anchored to the oil shelf.

The glass-bottle versions of the original SKUs are a thoughtful response to the brand's most persistent customer ask. The squeeze bottle is the product; some customers wanted glass anyway. Offering both rather than switching is the right call, because abandoning the squeeze bottle would abandon the positioning.

What other CPG brands can take from this

Three structural lessons travel.

First: pack format is positioning. Graza did not invent a new olive varietal, a new region, or a new processing method. It put a familiar product in a different bottle and named the SKUs after how to use them. The investment that produced the brand's outsized growth was an investment in pack and naming, not in product chemistry. Founders in commoditized categories should spend more time on what their pack tells a shopper to do.

Second: a curated single-farm story is more defensible than a generic single-estate claim. The brand's actual sourcing structure — many farms, one farm per lot, with rotating supply — is more rigorous than a vague “single-origin” tagline and easier to keep honest as the brand scales. Telling the structural truth tends to age better than telling the marketing truth.

Third: cultural footprint inbound-pulls retail. The retailers came to Graza because the brand had earned shelf demand before it asked for shelf space. That is a different model from the standard “get into Whole Foods, drive demand from the shelf” playbook, and it requires sustained investment in cultural surfaces — recipe creators, food media, Instagram-native pack design — that many CPG brands still treat as a marketing afterthought. The brand that gets pulled into retail tends to negotiate better terms than the brand that begs its way in.

What the press is saying

Where to actually buy Graza

Each link below goes directly to Graza on that retailer's site so you can add it to your cart without searching:

Bottom line

Graza is the kind of brand that is easy to underestimate until you understand the structure. Andrew Benin and Allen Dushi did not invent a new olive varietal, a new region, or a new processing method. They put a familiar product in a different bottle, named the SKUs after how to use them, and built cultural pull on top of a sourcing story they could keep honest as they scaled. Three years later, that combination put them on 11,000 shelves on less than $3M of outside capital.

If you want to try it, the best place to start is directly from graza.co, where the full lineup ships across the US.

Sources

CNBC Make It (June 2024), Bloomberg (September 2024), Inside Retail US (2025), The Foodstack (2025), New Hope Network, Read On Hand, PR Newswire (2022), graza.co. All claims verified against primary sources at draft date 2026-06-25. Sales and store-count figures are as reported by the company in press interviews — Grocer Folk has not independently audited.