Trendy olive oil brand Graza is cracking open a new way to refill its iconic bottles

In the two years since Graza launched in 2022 , the olive oil maker’s dark-green, twist-top squeeze bottles have become ubiquitous. Graza didn’t exactly reinvent the wheel; the squeeze bottle has long been championed by professional chefs as a tactile and practical tool that allows for unique precision while cooking. But the oil aficionados at Graza took that familiar form and brought it into people’s homes.



“It seems like it’s important to us only from a branding and advertising perspective,” Graza cofounder and CEO Andrew Benin says of the company’s savvy packaging, but it has also “been important from a product functionality, product quality perspective.” 



That same principle is central to Graza’s new line of olive oil refill containers. Packaged in beer cans, the refills—which launch today at select Whole Foods stores nationwide and on the company’s site—fit neatly into Graza’s fun and breezy brand.



Benin says his beer can refill idea emerged—where else?—over a few cold ones during a Graza team lunch in Spain. Wouldn’t it be cool, he ventured, to store olive oil in cans? He knew the concept had legs when the eyes of his Spanish colleagues (an otherwise skeptical, traditionalist bunch) lit up. But it’s not just a gimmick. With enough whimsy to stand out against a sea of dark-glass bottles of olive oil on store shelves, the cans, like their squeeze-bottle forebears, were “engineered out of function,” Benin says. 



[Photo: Graza]



The aluminum vessels are opaque and nitrogen-sealed, protecting them from olive oil’s mortal enemy, oxygen, which leads to rancidity. That the beer-size cans are a one-for-one relationship with Graza’s preexisting packaging is a little bit of kismet. At 750 milliliters, the “Sizzle” cooking-oil refills are the same size as Australia’s cans of famed suds, Fosters; and the 500-milliliter “Drizzle” finishing oil cans match the 16.9-ounce tallboys you might find at the local bodega.



Graza’s refill cans are also a less unwieldy size than the 3- or 5-liter tins and jugs typically reserved for restaurants. Those tins of Costco-size proportions are less amenable to home cooks, who might have trouble using all that oil before it spoils. Graza is selling both varieties of its extra-virgin olive oil a starter kit with two empty squeeze bottles and an Oxo funnel meant to aid the refill process. 



The idea for refills didn’t form in a beer can-shaped vacuum. Graza customers—and would-be customers—have long been clamoring for a refill option via social media, emails, and the company’s post-purchase surveys. Even if Graza fans fill their spent squeeze bottles with a different olive oil, the bottles only get so much mileage before they form a greasy film. Other consumers would rather avoid a plastic option altogether, opting for more readily recyclable materials like glass and metal. 



With the cans, the hope is that Graza will gain plastic-averse customers who may have previously eluded the brand, even if those customers decide to sidestep the squeeze bottles altogether. “Buy a Graza refill and now you can fill your own vessel, whatever you have at home,” Benin says. “We allowed ourselves to be more for everyone than we were prior.” 



Dan Frommer, a veteran tech and business journalist and editor-in-chief of The New Consumer , says that Graza’s latest launch is a savvy turn toward consumers who aim to make their purchases with sustainability in mind—and that plastic is a particularly visible boogeyman when it comes to consumers’ perception of sustainability.



[Photo: Graza]



“I think most people would perceive aluminum as more recyclable and more eco-friendly over other things—like more plastic,” Frommer says. Indeed, 75% of all aluminum made since 1880 is still in circulation, while roughly 5% of plastic products are recycled.



But canning comes with its own set of challenges, and at a greater expense than plastic packaging.



If you’ve ever seen a video of the beer or soda canning process, you know it’s an efficient yet messy process, with the contents often sloshing over the sides before a quick rinse cleans the cans. Olive oil, on the other hand, isn’t water soluble, meaning spillage could lead to greasy cans and slippery floors—an Occupational Safety and Health Administration “no-no,” as Benin puts it. Troubleshooting that process required hard work and expensive machinery.



Nitrogenating the cans also slows down the bottling process, as precise drops of liquid nitrogen must be dropped into individual cans before capping and seaming. For the Graza brain trust, the juice—or oil—is worth the squeeze. Nitrogenization forces out oxygen in the can’s headspace while also pressurizing the container and maintaining rigidity.



It helps that beer cans have gained an elusive cool factor in recent years. Once reserved for cheap and watery macrobrews, cans have emerged as the de facto container for craft breweries, owing to aluminum’s opacity and portability as well shifting consumer perceptions that “good” bear can come only in glass containers. Cans are also the vessel of choice for a growing roster of design-forward water brands .



The beer can refills signal Graza’s biggest launch since its inception, and the young company has grown wiser along the way.



Last year, Benin penned a fiery LinkedIn post calling out Brightland and its founder, Aishwarya Iyer, for launching its own squeezable olive oil bottle . With its latest design, Graza is looking at the competition with a little more grace. “We definitely channeled that emotion into being always one step ahead,” Benin says. “We are looking forward when other people are looking at us.”