How Graza Rejected Growth-At-All-Costs For Brand Building

Graza has become known for its distinctive squeeze bottle packaging and methodical approach to growth, prioritizing product quality and strategic partnerships over instant gratification.GrazaIn an era when many consumer brands chased venture capital and rapid expansion, Andrew Benin, CEO and Co-Founder of Graza, took a different path. Since launching in 2022, his olive oil brand has become known for its distinctive squeeze bottle packaging and methodical approach to growth, prioritizing product quality and strategic partnerships over instant gratification. Benin’s journey from cooking at Gramercy Tavern to building what he believes will be a top-two olive oil company offers a masterclass in patient brand building. In this conversation, we explore Graza’s unconventional approach to sourcing, the strategy behind its iconic packaging, how the brand navigated early retail partnerships, and what Benin sees as the future of consumer brand building.Dave Knox: I want to go back to the very beginning. What led you to launch Graza in 2022? Andrew Benin: There was a confluence of factors. Everyone in my world has their own food journey, whether through health or cooking. For me, prior to Graza, it was obsessing over nutrition, trying to figure out what was happening in the nutritional landscape in the United States. I actually got into grad school at Tufts in Boston to focus on nutrition. I didn’t get the scholarship I wanted and pivoted back to the private sector, joining Magic Spoon. After that, I worked at the New York City Green Market, the local farmers market. Then, as happens in New York, I met and fell in love with my wife, who's from Spain—and there's a lot of great olive oil in Spain. I got lucky enough to try an amazing bottle when visiting her family for the first time. And an obsession began. A true obsession. It came way before Sizzle, way before Drizzle, way before everything. Olive oil was interesting because it has 50%-plus household penetration. In a world of startups targeting niches, this felt like a new challenge because it was so expensive, so saturated, so commonplace. It was an obsession with a big opportunity.Knox: Consumers have become obsessed with your amazing packaging since day one. What led to that insight?Benin: It’s funny because I cooked on the line at Gramercy Tavern, where we used squeeze bottles for both cooking and finishing. I wish I'd remembered that when starting Graza, because it came much later. People call it chaos packaging now, and that term rubs me the wrong way because I think what we're saying is that differentiation through packaging is table stakes—the same way everything else in the advertising and branding landscape is table stakes. No one thing gets it done anymore. You have to be amazing at everything. The squeeze bottle inspiration came from using a Dr. Bronner's bottle in the shower and running out of the bathroom extremely sudsy because Dr. Bronner's takes forever to wash off. But I compromised on the suds and ran straight to the kitchen, washed it out, filled it with olive oil, and started squeezing it into a pan. It felt like we'd discovered a new tactile experience in the kitchen. It wasn't about olive oil or a squeeze bottle or a brand. It was about a feeling—literally, the act of squeezing felt more empowering, and there could be a story and movement behind it for cooking as a whole.Knox: You've been part of fast-growing brands in the consumer space. When you launched Graza, what did you want to do differently?Benin: We were coming out of a generation rooted in growth at all costs, propped up by venture capital flowing into young consumer food brands. It's a delicate landscape because so much of success past your early adopter community depends on retail execution and top-of-funnel marketing, which is more expensive. There's no amount of investment capital that can compensate for how inefficient your marketing becomes and how risky it becomes to compete at the highest levels. What I saw was a lot of instant gratification-style marketing and consumer investment—what's the biggest ROI? Try a bunch of things. If it doesn't work, stop. If it works, double down. It felt like gambling. MORE FOR YOUThis time around, it felt more strategic and rooted in the product. First and foremost: Is our product the best? Is it priced appropriately? How is it positioned? Who are the first customer buckets we're going after—the health and wellness community, the culinary community? We were more specific and targeted and chipped away at it rather than throwing darts.Knox: Many DTC brands could gamble early on because they sourced from domestic co-packers where the supply chain was a little more flexible. Olive oil is different. How did you source quality olive oil and find the right partners?Benin: That was probably the hardest part. It takes persistence, respect, and genuine curiosity to compel people in antiquated industries to shift their thinking. You can give people financial comfort and say, "I'll put my money where my mouth is. I'll pre-purchase the product even before it's harvested." Eight months before a farmer removes the crop from the trees, you already have a customer because I so believe in what I want to sell. There was a lot of that as far as we could extend ourselves. At the same time, there's deep-rooted knowledge—many people in industries like olive oil are 60-plus. It's not 30-year-olds in Brooklyn running around Andalusia or Tuscany. It's people with experience, and they respond positively to people being inquisitive about their careers, their legacy, their practices—wanting to learn first before proliferating. Propping up a brand in the U.S. quickly with a co-packer is all about proliferation. There's no curiosity about the practices, the machines, or how long they've been there. There's a trend you're trying to capture for instant gratification. Our approach was much different. It had to be.Knox: How did you balance that supply chain and lead time with your first major partners? What came first—the product, the sourcing, or the retail partner?Benin: We were levered up. We were using debt. We were tight on payroll every single month for the first two years. That's where our resources went. There was a bit of "if he's doing it, I'll do it too." You start to chip away at some people in an agricultural community, and they jump on board because they see validation from someone they trust. So it was easier to expand our supply network for the quality of oil we wanted than it was to finance it. Now, four and a half years in, we have financing vehicles that allow us a line of credit to buy 100% of our inventory annually, and we have our own storage facilities. But it was difficult at the beginning. It's a healthy mix of being a salesperson to convince people to even do something, even if there are financial gains, because that's not enough. You're not the first person to come into their backyard talking about money. That's a very normal farmer-capitalist relationship. They've seen that, invested, and lost money. So it was just chipping away.Knox: What did the retail journey look like for Graza?Benin: Faster than we imagined. Not to say it's smart to go into large-scale retailers early on—you're still figuring out your actual margin profile. And retail flips that margin structure via distributors, chargebacks, buybacks, promotion, end caps, and shippers. It becomes a real estate game. Ours was swift. We were in Whole Foods five months into our launch. The formula of one retailer really getting behind your product at the beginning, and you putting your resources behind that retailer—advertising against them, driving traffic to them, showing true partnership—was wise. We did that and still have a strong relationship with Whole Foods. The strength of that relationship makes it possible to expand elsewhere without rubbing your early brand champions wrong. We're trying to grow, and you can't grow in just one place. But making those investments early on was really impactful.Knox: When did you decide to do your first product innovation beyond the core squeeze bottle?Benin: Pretty fast. We tried to patent the squeeze bottle and failed because there was a claim we weren't in market long enough—there wasn't a clear association between our brand and the packaging yet. Whereas the Coca-Cola glass bottle is so associated with Coca-Cola that no one else can use it. So we had to move fast because everyone was going to copy us. We started working on the refill cans to be one step ahead—do another thing no one else can do. Buy machinery and retrofit it for olive oil production as opposed to beer, so our squeeze bottle has a lifecycle ecosystem rather than just being another squeeze bottle. That came maybe a year later. Now you can find our olive oil in glass bottles that look identical to our squeeze bottles with a great pop-up spout. You can find us in bag-in-box. I wouldn't say there's nobility in expanding SKUs—it creates operational complexity and is a disservice to the consumer. It's mostly in service of shelf space in retail, which is real.Knox: When did you start thinking about collaborations, especially collaborations that took you beyond the olive oil aisle?Benin: Early on. For young brands, it's probably the most efficient way to capture new impressions. What's the give and get? Early brands like us and Fishwife were very aware there was probably 50% consumer overlap between our bases, but 50% wasn't. All we had to do was collaborate, send an email to each other's audiences, or do something to expose more people efficiently to each other's brands. We didn't feel competitive. There's brand marketing collaboration, and then there's real product collaboration—like our collaboration with Ithaca Hummus that became their number one SKU, outperforming other SKUs they spent 10 years building. There's different power, investment, and economics when it comes to widely distributed retail collaborations. In theory, it's all payback for investing so much in brand development early on. Cutting those $150K-$200K checks early on to build a brand is terrifying for most people, and rightfully so, because 99% of them fail. But you were going to fail with a good brand or without one, probably. So you need it to stand a chance. For us, there's continual ROI on having it. Everyone wants a piece right now, and we're in a position to say no more than yes. Early on, we were saying yes to too many things every week and misutilizing our team's resources.Knox: How do you think about brand equity when deciding where to say yes or no to partnerships?Benin: Just getting leveraged for brand equity isn't enough. It's disingenuous because brand awareness is built over time. Even in our world, with the ability to garner attention quickly, it's offset by someone else doing it just as quickly. Real brand equity is built over time. If I wanted to license the Harry Potter brand—that's brand equity. It's cross-generational, has a theme park, movies, books, global reach. For us, it's about the product and the quality of the oil. Is this a category loosely connected to olive oil that makes sense? Is olive oil the main input ingredient? Are we facilitating a different flavor profile, a better flavor profile, a healthier flavor profile? Are we checking boxes rather than just pimping out our brand? If you do that with a young, nascent brand, you'll probably stumble and kneecap yourself from being able to do it when you really can cash in on your brand equity. If we do it too much right now and three out of five don't work well, the big fish coming in five years isn't going to come anymore.Knox: You mentioned that when launching Graza, you were coming off a time when brands were spending money fast trying to proliferate. You took a more thoughtful approach. What advice do you give entrepreneurs launching a brand today about what brand building will look like in the next five years?Benin: If I see anyone pigeonholed to one potential customer, I run the other way. Even in health and wellness, look at Athletic Greens—they nailed it in terms of brand positioning. Just three years later, they've got gummies, other green powders, everything. The person who wins that space will compel someone who would have never thought to do a greens anything ever. It's all about that next consumer base being harder than the first one. So I look at brands and people who can think that way and not just lean into their core consumer, because that magic runs out. We need to compel people who've never even tasted extra virgin olive oil to buy Graza. It's easier to say, "You buy extra virgin olive oil, so buy mine," than to get the next consumer to join the olive oil party. Think about that when you're starting something.Knox: What about the entrepreneurial journey itself? What advice do you give founders who want to launch a new brand?Benin: There's a difference between being an entrepreneur and leading a company. An entrepreneur can get something to market, be convincing, and rally people together early on, but may be unaware of what it takes to lead a company. So be aware of that. Be reading, be talking to people, be asking for feedback, and be sure you're ready for it. There's a lot of sacrifice. You have to know why you're doing it. Otherwise, you'll wake up one day and feel strange about how you spend your time and your life. Reset. Keep asking yourself why you're doing this, or have someone do that for you along the way. Friends do it for me. It's really hard. It's glorified in our culture. The podcast world specifically is one where entrepreneurship is spoken about a lot, and it's incredibly inspiring, usually. But I don't think we spend enough time talking about the difficulties—the family dynamics that are challenged. I have kids. How much time am I spending with my kids versus my company versus my coworkers? That comes back to why you're doing it.Knox: As you said, leading the company versus just being the entrepreneur—where do you see leading the company for the next 18 to 24 months? Benin: You're going to see Graza become a top-two olive oil company. We're very clear on what our goals are in our core category. We're in growth mode and orienting around people and strategies that align with the level of growth we think we can achieve. You'll see us expand into other categories. You'll see us not collaborate and take a stance on where we think we have a right to win because we're doing the things we did so well in olive oil. We're using olive oil, creating delicious things, working in categories that are highly consumable, habitual, tactile. We're going to follow our DNA but do it elsewhere. I think we've got a pretty big CPG company on our hands.