Surprising Success of America’s Fastest-Growing Artisanal Olive Oil Club

Grows so popular, its founder must limit membership

by Gary MacNeil for Fabulous Food Finds

ASHEVILLE, N.C.—Why would the founder of America’s fastest-growing mail-order olive oil club need to put a limit on the number of members he can accept?

And for that matter, why would many thousands of olive oil lovers want to join his club when scores of well-known olive oils are conveniently available at every supermarket in America?

I recently put these questions to T. J. Robinson, founder of the Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club. His club’s soaring popularity has been a surprise success story in the olive oil industry.

Why So Many Olive Oil Lovers Now Avoid Buying Olive Oil in Stores

Robinson explains the main reason for his club’s rising popularity in a single word: freshness.

“Americans,” he says, “have come to discover what Italians, Greeks, and other olive-oil-loving people around the world have known for centuries. Store-bought olive oils that sit on the shelf for months cannot compare in freshness, flavor, and nutritional richness with olive oil fresh from the harvest.

“Olive oil, unlike wine, does not get better with age. Just the opposite. It’s perishable. The olive, after all, is a fruit. Similar to other fruit juices, olive oil is best enjoyed fresh-squeezed. That’s when it delivers its zenith of freshness, flavor, and nutritional potency. With your first taste or smell, you’ll notice the difference immediately. Fresh-pressed olive oil remains at this peak of flavor for about six months, after which it degrades. And that’s true of all olive oils, no matter how expensive.

“That’s why savvy olive oil lovers always look for a ‘pressing date’ on the label. Sometimes it’s called the ‘harvest date.’ This tells you how fresh the olive oil is. If it’s beyond six months, don’t buy it! The flavor and precious nutrients you’re paying for start to deteriorate six months after pressing.

“Unfortunately, in supermarkets it can be almost impossible to find olive oils with pressing dates on their labels. Here’s why: many olive oils take months after the harvest to arrive in the US. Then they can sit in a warehouse for additional months and, after that, languish on store shelves for yet more months.

“As a result, producers don’t want you to see how old and possibly stale their olive oils are, so they intentionally omit the pressing date on their labels. They may stamp a ‘best used by” date on the label. But don’t be fooled—that’s merely a guide to avoiding rancidity and has nothing to do with peak flavor and nutritional potency. Outrageously, in my view, many of these ‘best used by’ dates are set to maximize shelf life and can run as long as two years, way beyond my recommended six-month freshness limit.”

How Robinson Secures Super-Fresh Olive Oil All Year Round

About ten years ago, Robinson, known worldwide as the Olive Oil Hunter®, vowed to find a way to secure harvest-fresh olive oil all year long so that olive oil lovers like himself could avoid what he considers shamelessly stale and flavorless olive oil in stores.

Four times a year he travels to the world’s latest olive harvests with a small panel of expert tasters in tow. From hundreds of premier olive oils offered to him by local, award-winning farms, he and his team sip, slurp, savor, compare notes, and then choose the best artisanal olive oils from each new harvest. He rushes his new treasures to the US by jet plane and then, on the final leg, by special delivery truck to the tables of his eagerly awaiting club members.

Robinson’s club has thus become an easy, convenient way to secure what many consider the freshest, most flavorful olive oils available in America, delivered straight to your kitchen four times a year from award-winning local farms around the world.

Chefs, foodies, health enthusiasts, and olive oil lovers have raved about these direct-from-the-harvest olive oils. For example, here’s how Larry Olmsted, the renowned food and travel journalist, describes these oils in his New York Times bestselling book, Real Food/Fake Food:

“I now get most of my oil from T. J. Robinson's Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club, and every time I open a bottle, my kitchen literally fills up with the smell of fresh crushed olive—the scent explodes out of the bottle. Just breaking the seal transports me to Italy or Spain or Chile.”

Mafia Scare Also Boosting Club’s Popularity

A second factor motivating olive oil lovers to join Robinson’s club has been the widespread media reporting about Mafia-tainted olive oil flooding US stores. In recent years, many of America’s most respected media, including Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and CBS News, among others, have reported the appalling news that many olive oils in US stores are cheap counterfeits made by the Mafia. According to 60 Minutes, shoppers face a “sea of fakes.” Italian investigators have even found that some fakes contain ingredients and chemicals that could cause serious harm.

Robinson’s club members love the security and selectivity of having him, in effect, as their personal “olive oil sommelier.” To protect his members against any and all suspect oils, he deals exclusively with the world’s most respected olive oil artisans. He also personally visits each harvest, selects each oil, and personally supervises every step of its shipment until it lands on your table. For the ultimate level of reassurance, he has all his olive oils independently lab-certified to be 100% pure extra virgin olive oil.

The Big Idea That Helped Robinson’s Sales Soar: You Can Try His Finest Olive Oil (Normally $39) for Just $1

There’s one other factor behind the popularity of Robinson’s club: his generous $1 “taste-the-difference-yourself” offer.

A native resident of North Carolina, Robinson is a reserved, well-mannered Southern gentleman, anything but the “pushy salesman” type.

He says he personally dislikes “selling” in all its overly aggressive forms. But early on, he had to do something, because every business needs a sales strategy.

So he thought of something perfectly tailored to his Southern gentleman’s way of doing things. He made a strategic decision to “let my harvest-fresh olive oil do the selling for me.”

His idea is a let’s-get-acquainted offer so reasonable and appealing that it’s hard for any curious olive oil lover to resist. It instantly made his sales take off. To this day, he still makes this offer available to any new customer who may be thinking of trying his oils.

Here’s the deal: If you are a fellow olive oil lover, he’s so sure that once you taste his harvest-fresh artisanal olive oil, you’ll never settle for ordinary store-bought olive oil again.

To prove it, he’s willing to send you—for just $1 to help him cover shipping—a free bottle of his finest artisanal olive oil (normally $39 retail) as a no-obligation introduction to his Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club. By “no obligation” he means that other than the $1 to help with shipping, you make no commitment and are under no obligation to buy anything, now or ever.

“This way,” he says, “you and I can let my olive oil itself tell you how delicious it is. Olive oil doesn’t exaggerate, lie, or use high pressure. You just put some in your mouth or taste it on a favorite dish and discover a whole new level of olive oil flavor. So from the start, our dealings with each other will be based on simplicity, integrity, and truth. It’s so simple. Try a $39 bottle yourself for just a buck and taste for yourself what a difference direct-from-the-harvest olive oil makes on your salads, veggies, meats, fish—all your favorite dishes. I truly believe that you’re in for one of the great tasting moments of your life, just as it was for me the first time I tried harvest-fresh extra virgin olive oil.”

It’s a simple, eminently reasonable proposition, and olive oil lovers have responded in droves.

But Why Is He Limiting Club Membership?

With success that would thrill any small business owner, why has Robinson decided to limit his club’s membership?

“I have no choice,” he says. “We source our olive oils exclusively from the finest award-winning artisanal producers in the world. Virtually all operate local boutique farms and small estates. These are tiny compared with the huge ‘factory farms’ that churn out cargo tankers full of mediocre mass-market oil.

“Based on what our small, master artisans can produce, our club can accept no more than 20,000 members. Last time I checked, we are at 16,757, so we still have some room to grow, although the remaining spots are filling up fast. Once we hit 20,000, we will allow a new member to join only as an established member leaves.

“But no matter what, we will always remain customer friendly, with no hype. So whenever we are open to new members, as we are now, we will stick with our reasonable, ‘prove-it-to-yourself’ $39-bottle-for-a-buck offer. It’s the fairest way I know to do business, and it’s worked out well for everyone involved—for me, our small-farm artisans, and especially each new club member who starts out by happily receiving a magnificent $39 bottle of one of the world’s finest artisanal olive oils, fresh from the latest harvest, for just $1.”

If you’d like to take him up on this offer, you can click on the link below.

A Parting Secret Robinson Learned from a World-Famous Chef

Before his current incarnation as the Olive Oil Hunter®, Robinson was a professional chef and food journalist who got to know some of the best chefs in the world. As I closed my interview with Robinson, I asked if there’s any advice he’d like to share with all of us who love great food. He thought for a moment and, with a smile, quoted something he learned from the world’s most honored living French chef, Alain Ducasse, who said, “Great cuisine is 60 percent ingredients and 40 percent technique.” Robinson added, “I strive to give my members both.”

I asked, how so?

Robinson explained that with every quarterly olive oil delivery, he also sends his members an informative, entertaining Pressing Report.

“This extra club benefit does two things, both in line with Ducasse’s sage advice.

“First, the Pressing Report enables my members to fully understand and appreciate the ‘60 percent ingredients’ aspect of these prize oils. It captures every highlight of my latest globetrotting olive oil hunt. This allows my club members to enjoy an ‘armchair adventure’ with me, meeting the farmers and families I just visited, seeing the beautiful and often remote places I traveled to secure their oils, the challenges I faced, oils I tried, and local dishes I savored. The Pressing Report also describes why I chose these oils above all others that I and my team sampled. And it provides each oil’s flavor profile and suggested food pairings so you can ‘build your own palate’s knowledge,’ as every worthy chef strives to do.

“That covers the ‘60-percent-ingredients’ part of Ducasse’s formula for great cuisine. Then, for the ‘40-percent-technique’ part, I share my seasonal and regionally inspired olive oil recipes and preparation methods that I’ve picked up on my journeys and in conversations with master chefs.

“As a result, my club members enjoy the finest extra virgin olive oils as one of their kitchen’s foundational ingredients and also learn simple techniques for bringing their dishes to new heights of flavor and enjoyment.”

For more information about Robinson’s Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club and his $39-Bottle-for-a-Buck” offer, feel free to click the link below:

If You'd Like to Taste the Difference Yourself, Here's T. J. Robinson’s
$39-Bottle-for-a-Buck Offer