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

Unique club scores a big hit with Paleo fans by delivering what stores can’t…

ASHEVILLE, N.C.—Why would many thousands of us in the Paleo community join an olive oil club when scores of well-known olive oils are conveniently available at every supermarket in America?

I recently put this question to T.J. Robinson, founder of the Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club. His club’s soaring popularity has been a surprise success story among Paleo fans.

The Fresher the Better

“Paleo shoppers,” says Robinson, “prize food that’s fresh, because that’s when it’s most full of life and nutritional value. This is true of meat. It’s true of fish, veggies, eggs, and fruit. And it’s also true of olive oil. Just like these other Paleo foods, olive oil is 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.

“And that’s the big problem with store-bought olive oils. They sit on the shelves for months, even years. They cannot compare in freshness, flavor, and nutritional richness with olive oil shipped to your door fresh from the new harvest, which is what we do.”

Always Look for This on the Label

Robinson adds, “This is why savvy Paleo shoppers always look for a ‘pressing date’ on an olive oil 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 U.S. Then they can sit in a warehouse for additional months and, after that, languish on store shelves for yet more months, even years.

“As a result, producers don’t want you to see how old and 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 has nothing to do with peak flavor and nutritional potency. Outrageously, in my view, many of these ‘best used by’ dates are set purely to keep the product on the shelf as long as possible 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 him could avoid stale, flavorless, and rancid olive oils in stores.

Four times a year, Robinson travels to the world’s most recent 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, savor, and compare notes. Then he chooses the best, most Paleo-friendly artisanal olive oils from each new harvest. He rushes his new treasures to the U.S. by jet and then by special delivery truck to the tables of his eagerly awaiting club members.

Robinson’s club has thus become an easy, convenient way for Paleo families 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.

Paleo fans, chefs, foodies, and health enthusiasts are raving 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 best-selling 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 olives—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 Paleo fans to join Robinson’s club has been the widespread media reports about Mafia-produced tainted olive oils flooding U.S. stores. We Paleo shoppers always prefer authentic, traditional foods over the scores of overly processed, chemical-laden unnatural packaged “foods” that line supermarket shelves. But this flood of fake olive oil cooked up by criminals is so beyond the pale that it’s scary.

Here’s what’s happening…

Thanks to the many health benefits of authentic olive oil, demand is skyrocketing worldwide. But 100% pure extra virgin olive oil (the highest grade) is expensive. So crooks have seized an opportunity. Notorious crime syndicates in Italy and elsewhere have been raking in fortunes by creating massive amounts of counterfeit extra virgin olive oils. Just as these crime families produce cheap knockoffs of designer clothing and handbags, they palm off fake olive oil as extra virgin. Without a lab test, it’s virtually impossible for a shopper to tell which olive oils on store shelves are real and which are flagrant imposters.

Since America is the world’s largest consumer market, the crooks have targeted American supermarkets as their favorite dumping ground. NBC News has reported that “fake olive oil is rampant.” The Wall Street Journal adds, “American grocery stores are awash in cheap, fake ‘extra virgins.’” In an explosive exposé, 60 Minutes has cautioned that you face a “sea of fakes” when you shop for olive oil in stores.

The New Yorker magazine has reported that the profits in counterfeiting olive oil are “comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks.”

Cancer-Causing Agents in Fake Olive Oils?

In his New York Times best-selling book, Extra Virginity, olive oil expert Tom Mueller warns of contaminants and even cancer-causing agents in fake olive oils, as follows:

“Italian investigators have found hydrocarbon residues, pesticides, and other contaminants in fake oils, and pomace oil, a common adulterant, sometimes contains mineral oil as well as PAHs, proven carcinogens that can also damage DNA and the immune system. Then there’s the 1981 case of toxic oil syndrome in Spain, when rapeseed oil adulterated with an industrial additive, sold as olive oil, killed eight hundred people and seriously injured thousands more.”

This is why you never want to feed your family counterfeit olive oils cooked up by criminals who couldn’t care less about your health or your family’s.

Robinson’s Oils Are Independently Lab-Certified to Be 100% Pure Extra Virgin

Robinson’s club members love the security and selectivity of having him, in effect, as their personal “olive oil sommelier.” To protect his club 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 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.

Frankly, this independent certification of purity was, all by itself, enough to induce me to give Robinson’s club a try. I have a husband and two boys who are the loves of my life. Just the thought that I could be feeding them harmful fake olive oil is totally unacceptable to me. I will not take that chance!

I Joined for the Purity…But Stayed for the Flavor

The first time I tried Robinson’s olive oil, I realized I was tasting true olive oil for the first time in my life. It was in the evening, right before dinner. I broke the seal on the bottle, removed the cap, and immediately smelled the oil’s fresh herbal fragrance. I poured a teaspoon, and the taste was just what Robinson promised—alive and potent and as complex as a fine wine. It was like a garden in a bottle, with wave after wave of fresh flavor. It was like no other olive oil I’d ever tasted, and I couldn’t wait to drizzle some on my favorite Paleo foods.

It was one of the most vivid tasting experiences of my life. Compared with store-bought olive oil, the difference was like tasting a freshly picked, luscious, field-ripened tomato versus a pale, muted, cardboardy, out-of-season tomato from a supermarket produce department. From that first experience of fresh-pressed olive oil, I knew that store-bought olive oils would never again have the same appeal to me.

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 a “pushy salesman.”

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 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, “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, dignity, 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 all your salads, veggies, meats, fish—all your favorite Paleo 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—especially in the Paleo community—have responded in droves.

For more information about Robinson’s Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club and his $39-Bottle-for-a-Buck offer, please click the link below.

A Guide to the World’s Finest Artisanal Olive Oils…and T.J. Robinson’s $39-Bottle-for-a-Buck Offer