Drizzle, Sizzle, And Now Frizzle. Graza Debuts New High-Heat Cooking Oil And Spray Bottle Format

In the world of grocery packaging design, there is no greater modern case study than Graza, the olive oil brand that’s not known for its olive oil. It’s become synonymous with its green squeeze bottles that pop out on a shelf among a sea of traditional, rustic-branded olive oils, earning the company a $240 million valuation in less than three years in business, its cofounder and CEO Andrew Benin tells me.

Graza’s straight-forward messaging like branding its varieties as “Drizzle,” to go directly on your food, and “Sizzle,” for cooking, rids the consumer of any guesswork in the kitchen. The brand continues to seize on that approach, as it launches its third variety today: “Frizzle,” a high-heat oil intended for frying–rolling out exclusively at Whole Foods Market stores nationwide. Not only will the new offering come in the classic green squeeze bottle, but an aluminum spray bottle, a new format for Graza. Other new packaging formats include a 2L jug and a 1.5L ‘bag-in-box.’ “It’s our biggest innovation since we started,” Benin says.

Frying With Frizzle

While the bottle of Frizzle is branded with the same green and yellow colors as the previous varieties, you’ll notice it’s not labeled Extra Virgin Olive Oil, but High-Heat Cooking Oil. That’s because although Frizzle is made of olives, it’s considered olive pomace oil, a high-heat oil that’s made from the upcycled olive remnants of both Drizzle and Sizzle.

Benin explains that Drizzle is made with small unripened olives, harvested in the fall before the Spanish rainy season, so there’s minimal water and oil inside. “That liquid, when pressed, creates a more concentrated product,” he says. “That flavor is so pure.” About six weeks afterward, the amount of liquid inside the olives doubles, then harvested for Sizzle–slightly less flavorful but intended more for the function rather than taste.

For each, the olives are milled then placed in a centrifuge to extract the oil before going through a refinement process to enhance the quality to Extra Virgin. Not much juice comes out, and the leftover goods are usually tossed. But Graza is now taking that pomace and putting it through another roller coaster in the centrifuge to squeeze out the rest of the liquid gold, then refining it to increase its smoke point, becoming Frizzle.

Frizzle is intended for the function of olive oil, even more so than Sizzle, due to its high smoke point of 490 degrees Fahrenheit. Sizzle, with a 410 degree smoke point, and certainly Drizzle, would likely burn when cranking up the heat, making Frizzle a good choice for cooking in a cast iron, wok, and on the grill for a nice char. “Sometimes you’re cooking something but you do not want the additional flavor of another ingredient,” Benin adds as another reason for creating Frizzle. “[Like if]

I’m making chocolate chip cookies and I want it to not taste like olive oil…I love it in all my food–but not everyone.”

A Love Letter To Olive Oil

Before launching the company, Benin would write poems and love stories directed towards olive oil. Those love letters, in the form of iPhone notes that he still looks back on today, stemmed from trips to Spain he would regularly take with his wife, who is from there. The olive oil he tried there hit him unlike he had ever experienced back home in New York. He describes it as a “sensory explosion,” tasting a bounty of flavor profiles and wafting scents he didn’t know olive oil could possess.

He primarily refers to the juice of Spanish Picual olives, which have become the source of Graza’s liquid. “I felt found, I felt seen,” Benin says, reflecting on those olive tree farms. “It wasn’t just a business. It was this whole world, this whole agriculture. It has history.”

“I never thought that I could fall in love with an olive, until I met the elegant yet fiery Picual, and it stole my heart,” he writes on the Graza blog.

Graza’s goal isn’t to make you feel as if you’re taking a trip to the rolling Spanish olive tree farms. Benin and his cofounder Allen Dushi market it to American consumers who just want some good, accessible olive oil. “Even though I fell in love with the Mediterranean, with olive oil, figuring out how to not make it overly aspirational is part of our special sauce,” Benin says. “You can literally make everything with it…Olive oil is not Italy. Italy is not olive oil. America is America. Olive oil is olive oil.”

Growing The Olive Oil Category

Graza is practically doubling its number of product offerings, strengthening its partnership with Whole Foods Market, the first major retailer to carry the product when it launched. The natural grocer has a strong extra virgin olive oil set, but it has never carried a ‘bag-in-box’ olive oil or an olive pomace oil. This all builds off of Graza’s launch of aluminum refill cans of Drizzle and Sizzle last year. “At some stage in your business life cycle, you have to start responding to what the market calls for.”

Brooke Gil, an olive oil sommelier and Principal Category Merchant for oils and vinegars at Whole Foods Market, personally asked Graza to create the boxed format. “I knew if anyone could use their packaging to tell the story of why ‘bag-in-box’ is ideal for storing EVOO, it would be Graza,” Gil tells me.  “[It’s] the most underrated packaging for EVOO…preserving the quality of the oil by preventing any exposure to light or air.” The box, only launching with Sizzle, holds enough oil to refill two squeeze bottles.

Because Frizzle and Sizzle are both intended more for function than taste, they’re each receiving the spray bottle treatment, or “Sprizzle,” as Benin likes to joke. Whole Foods Market prohibits spray bottles that use a chemical propellant. “All of our sprays are natural propellant…It’s just pressure pushing it out,” Benin says. “People seemed to want the spray due to the huge spike in using air fryers.”

The company is doubling down on its refill options, also launching a 2L jug of Frizzle, initially available online only. It fits the functionality of Frizzle for the use-occasion of deep-frying, requiring a lot more oil than what fits in the squeeze bottle.

Pomace oil can have a negative perception; Whole Foods has never carried a pomace oil before. But Graza produces its high-heat olive pomace oil differently than the standard process. “[This oil is] extracted through heat and pressure from the pomace produced in their EVOO production process in small batches, avoiding chemicals typically involved in a refining process,” Gil explains. “The result is a pomace oil with strong oleic content and a lower percentage of acidity than you would expect with a regular pomace oil.” The upcycled pomace for Frizzle doesn’t sit and develop impurities like other pomace oils are known for. “Around half of what we’re producing…is reprocessed right away,” Benin says. “The other half is maximum five days of being air-dried in the Spanish sun…as opposed to five months.” A small portion of Sizzle is then added into Frizzle for a tiny boost of flavor and some of the polyphenols and antioxidants that are packed inside the olive oils.

That Green Squeeze Bottle

This is what makes Graza, Graza–its vision of branding itself as novel in the olive oil category, yet seemed all too familiar. Benin worked hand-in-hand with Gander, the Brooklyn-based design studio behind other branding successes like Banza, Yellowbird, and Magic Spoon. “[Graza’s brand] is not only the label and the logo, but it is also the bottle itself,” says Katie Levy, cofounder of Gander and Graza’s creative director.

The squeeze bottle was Benin’s one non-negotiable when fruiting a branding strategy with Gander. A squeeze bottle–a most basic of kitchen tools–paired with olive oil–a most ancient elixir. Far from reinventing the wheel, Graza executed its vision of revolutionizing what olive oil can look like on grocery shelves (sparking a trail of copycats too). Benin was committed to providing a great product that doubled as a functional tool. “We say, use it every day in every way,” Levy says. “And the more you use it, the more fun you’re having.”

For the sake of maintaining quality, they went against the norm by deciding to use an opaque bottle. “Consumer research in cooking fats and olive oil showed that people want to see what’s inside,” says Benin. But because light hitting the oil degrades its quality over time, even by the time it typically hits store shelves, they decided to take a risk to back up their claims about prioritizing quality. “Everything we do is because it’s good for the oil.”

And the brand’s attempt to communicate that to the consumer is clear–its label serves as an educational tool, particularly important because choosing an olive oil on the shelf can be confusing. “In the survey that we did…even though ‘extra virgin’ was the most important factor, none of them could quite articulate what it meant,” Levy says.

Using terms like Drizzle and Frizzle come off as more explicit than “finishing oil’ and ‘smoke point.’ And the quirky graphics, like a tap coming straight out of an olive and a cooking thermometer dipped in the oil, tell the story of function as overtly as possible. “[We’re] showing people the difference, articulating it both in words and in image.” she says, something that Whole Foods is now prioritizing. “I’ve been working with our supplier community to revise and revamp their labeling to educate our customers on finish, flavor, and usage occasions, as well as deeper storytelling on quality,” Gil explains.

Graza has sprinted its way into the American zeitgeist. Consumers are more conscious than ever, and the intentionality emanating from Graza makes it exactly a brand that would thrive today. Part of that intentionality is convenience and knowledge. The rest, Benin says, “is all about fun in the kitchen.”