The story behind it
Why this site exists
I came to the United States in late 2005 with very little English and a van’s worth of my family’s products from Provence — olives, oil, the things I had grown up with. I had a website ready before most small producers had even heard the word, and a shopping cart running before most of my competitors had one. To sell those products I had to learn how people found things online. That is how a Provençal olive merchant accidentally became an SEO.
Back then I built my links the slow way. I set up alerts for anything written about olives and olive oil anywhere in the world, and when something came up I would write a short, honest paragraph about it, by hand, and point people to the source. One olive at a time, for years. This very domain is part of that history — older than most of the companies now selling olives online.
I spent more than twenty years in the trade. Eventually I left it for a career building and ranking large websites for enterprises around the world — the same craft, larger canvas. The olives I left behind. But I never stopped loving them, and I never stopped noticing how much of what is said about them, especially by the people selling them, simply isn’t true.
I have nothing to sell you here. No oil, no brand, no shop, no affiliate scheme dressed up as advice. I am out of the business, and that is the whole point: I can finally say the things a working seller never could. The cost of an olive from grove to shelf. How cheap oil is cut. Why “extra virgin” so often isn’t. The plain facts, from someone with no stake in which bottle you buy.
What olives101 is now
An encyclopedia — one honest page per olive. The true stories the sellers won’t tell you. News from the olive world worldwide, rewritten plainly and kept in English and French. And, because I love them and they are the perfect companion to an olive grove, a small corner for lavender.
It is a labour of love, written by one person who spent a working life around this fruit and simply wants the truth about it to exist somewhere clean and unbought. Welcome.