Citizenship from The Ground Up

When the real impact of the pandemic on the hospitality industry became clear in April of last year, I found myself at a bit of a crossroads – founder of a business that didn’t need a founder to see its way through the challenges it was facing.

You see, over time and as a business grows, the founder’s role becomes increasingly strategic and a lot less about the day-to-day. It’s just the natural way of things; founders like to create things, but there’s almost certainly better people to run them. With the Maverick Drinks business being forced to adjust to find new opportunities, anyone in our business who found themselves without much work to do was asked to volunteer for furlough – myself included. 

I spent the next few weeks trying to stay informed of what was going on with the business, even as I was sitting on the sidelines. It was the first time in the seven years since we started Maverick Drinks that I wasn’t there putting all of my energy into seeing it succeed (or to share in its struggles). It was more than just the work – I actually felt like I’d lost a bit of my identity. Almost the entirety of my career in hospitality was as the founder of Maverick Drinks and if I wasn’t doing that, what was I going to do?

Back in the Summer of 2006, having backpacked (and partied) my way through the Greek island of Los and made my way back to the UK, I ended up on an early morning ferry to Crete, so that I could catch a cheap flight that evening. Sat next to me was a woman from the Cretan capital, Heraklion, who happened to be an English teacher. She invited me into her home, cooked easily the best meal I’d had all week (not hard when my diet consisted of hard liquor and kebabs), gave me a tour of the city, and made sure I was at the airport on time. (It was only years later that I’d find out that Cretans are known for their abundant hospitality). A friendship was born. 

I have continued to visit every year since, now two or three times a year. They really are like family – I’m even the godfather to her son. With each visit, they would always send us back to the UK with bottles (read: five litre jugs) of their olive oil. When we’d share it with friends, the reaction was always the same – there was something special about this oil. 

Long before the pandemic hit, my wife, Sarah, and I had been thinking about how we could bottle a small amount or just get the oil from a few trees (because that’s how we thought it worked). Towards the end of 2019, we even went so far as trademarking a name and making a plan to get the oil here, but never really had the time or focus to do much more than that.

Full-time furlough meant I now had the time, and I also knew how fortunate I was to have a supportive employer, and some pay still coming in, which gave me the motivation. We also reduced our outgoing expenses significantly by being forced to give up our two favourite things: going out and traveling. So, we started putting every penny we had (and a bit more) straight into creating our own brand of Single Estate Extra Virgin Olive Oil.

Everyone thought we were crazy – what did we know about the olive oil business? Just because we had a source for the liquid didn’t mean we had any experience of how to create a food brand, much less how to sell it. Shouldn’t we be saving our money for what was (and still is) an uncertain future? 

We decided to start selling olive oil for a few reasons. For starters, hardly anyone we knew could name any olive oil brands. Something that many of them used almost every day and yet – they couldn’t name a single one. That signaled an opportunity to do something different in the category.

We bought every Greek olive oil we could find (and many from other countries too) and truth be told, there were hardly any differences from one brand to the next. They all shared the same design cues: gold foiling, old world font styles, almost cliche references to their heritage and tradition. The flavours all seemed muted compared to our vibrant Greek oil. There was just nothing exciting about any of them and so we were convinced we could do something different. 

Drawing on my experience with craft spirits and our shared love of wine, we chose a Burgundy wine bottle for our olive oil which set the framework for what we were trying to do. We often look at the natural wine movement and have drawn many parallels between these two worlds – highlighting terroir, different varietals of olives, their impact on flavour, and more. 

Another reason was, obviously, that we had direct access to this incredible olive oil - but it was more than that. In the past, the Amargiotakis family would typically sell their oil to a bulk agent who would carelessly blend it with hundreds of other families’ olive oils (of differing qualities) and send it off to Athens, where it’d be sold as a commodity. From there, it would be shipped off to any number of other bottlers (and countries). Any sense of where this beautiful olive oil came from or who produced it would be erased and the original producers (our extended Greek family) got very little for it – not enough to live on and certainly not enough to invest in improving their farming practices from one year to the next. 

We believe in fair pay, so we were driven by a desire to help them make their harvest a meaningful part of their lives. Even if we failed, we’d still be putting more money into their pockets and making a positive difference in their lives – even for a short time – and that’d be enough for us.

Lastly, we couldn’t believe that people knew so little about something used every day – and even praised in the foodie community – as a central part of so much of our food. People have no idea where most of their olive oils come from, who makes them, or what goes into them. They don’t know how true their health claims are for different styles of olive oil or even really how best to use them (hint: there’s more to olive oil than just salads and breads). 

So we set out to create a brand that, first and foremost, we could develop a community around – something I’d always pushed for with Maverick Drinks. It had to relate to the land where we source the product from, but also be something people could identify with. We thought about some of the things in our lives that become the strongest bonds for many of us, like family, religion, and country. With Sarah and I both being from the US and thinking of ourselves as ‘global citizens’, we originally agreed on the name “State of Soil”, because it was both about the state (country), but also the physical state (health) of the soil – geddit? We even trademarked the name, but eventually agreed that it wasn’t the country that was important, but the people within it, and thus Citizens of Soil was born.

What we didn’t realise was that we’d quickly fall even more in love with olive oil and discover an entire community of similarly passionate people that we didn’t even know existed. We listened to olive oil podcasts, subscribed to the Olive Oil Times, Sarah joined an international group called “Women in Olive Oil”, we did virtual tastings with olive oil sommeliers, and we watched every olive oil production video we could find. 

We learned about acidity levels, polyphenols, and olive varietals. We tasted dozens of olive oils and, of course, learned the proper way to taste them. Most importantly, we went out to Crete for the harvest and were involved in every step of the production from collecting the olives to extracting the oil at the mill. We literally had a hand in creating something delicious from its raw ingredients – and it reminded me of the craft that went into producing the extraordinary spirits at the first distillery I ever visited (Ransom Spirits in Sheridan, Oregon).

That’s what really draws me in and makes this all so easy to write about – watching something go from a natural raw resource, whether that’s grain, fruit, nut, or anything else, and through processes that have been around for thousands of years, turn it into something completely different that can be enjoyed by all. It’s as much art as it is science, and the result is something that brings people together – whether that’s around a dinner table or propping up a bar.

It’d be cliche to say we’re not doing it for the money – it also wouldn’t be true – but the main reason we want this to be successful, is so that we can continue doing more of it. We’d love to do more olive oils from more producers who are doing things in a regenerative way. This means right by the planet and people. We also have plans of how we could replace other household staples that we all take for granted and do this in a more fair, circular way. 

But most of all, we want to continue creating things that everyone can enjoy that pay respect to the people that make them and the places they come from. As the owner of the olive groves, Maria, said to me, what they were producing was previously under-appreciated, so it fills her with pride to see people here in the UK saying such wonderful things about something they work hard to produce.

We may not have known anything about olive oil at the start of this adventure, but the best investment I could think to make was investing in ourselves. We’re learning new things every day, developing new skills, working through the issues, and celebrating even the smallest wins. We’re hustling, we’re growing, and we’re doing it our way. Most importantly, we’re doing something with purpose that connects people and places at a time when many people, including ourselves, have felt a lot more disconnected than usual. 

Ps. You can get 10% off at Citizens of Soil now with code ‘DISCARD10’