I’m Tired of Millennial Branding and I Like My Uncool ’90s Olive Oil

I’m tired of “aesthetic,” millennial-marketed EVOO brands and long for the early-2000s, Tuscan-decor-kitchen vibes of Pompeian

As far as the aesthetic pantry goods movement [smiles in Fishwife] is concerned, olive oil has been at the forefront. At this point, we know who is sitting at the cool kid EVOO table; there’s Brightland, whose bottles have that expensive-feeling, amphoric appeal, and Graza, with its playful, albeit, divisive squeeze bottle design — truly the Baggu of EVOO. There’s Fat Gold, which delivers on minimal but graphic tins, and Rubirosa, whose eye-catching bottle scratches a similar itch to the ongoing check print trend — and that’s to name just a handful.

Lately, however, I have been overwhelmed — if not straight-up exhausted — by all of this overemphasis on graphic design. I have tasted most of the options above and admire their commitments to quality ingredients and desire to build thoughtful brand identities (Heraclea’s recent fair trade status comes to mind). But I have also observed a slow, steady gravitation amongst my friends and food media colleagues toward pantry items that feel less aggressively hopecore-d out by what has, admittedly, become a predictable onslaught of wavy, squiggly, font-forward millennial packaging.

I’ve been yearning for the lo-fi, unbothered olive oils of yore. I’ve been looking with fresh eyes at my towering, plastic Pompeian olive oil jug that was a mainstay of my mother’s shopping cart in the 1990s, with its so-uncool-it’s-cool Thomas Kinkade-esque landscapes on the packaging. A single glance at its Under the Tuscan Sun era packaging sends me to a place of comfort.

Pompeian is a solid olive oil, for the record — the Robust EVOO in particular has a ripe and slightly nutty taste that I like for both cooking meats and dipping crusty breads. And while it may not look like it belongs on the shelves of an overpriced boutique gift store in Williamsburg, it’s not necessarily a super-budget pick; a 25.3-ounce bottle of Graza is about $16, while a 16-ounce bottle of Pompeian is about $9. Pompeian is also sustainably grown, owned by a family of farmers, and uses cold-press technology to create a smoother taste. In short, it may not be “aesthetic,” but it’s still good stuff. And I’m not throwing a gauntlet down against today’s cool kid olive oils, but not everything in your kitchen has to be Instagram-optimized.

But that’s not to say I don’t love the look of it — in fact, I’m here to explain that I very much do. Pompeian’s products really capture the kind of earnest charm I yearn for these days. Behold, dare I ask, the romantic, pale pink label of its Rosé balsamic vinegar, made me nostalgic for early 2000s episodes of The Bachelor and Céline Dion CDs, while the Grimace-purple grapeseed oil bottle label represents a charming one-and-done approach (grapes = purple) to marketing, especially in combination with its Frasier-worthy font. It does look like the brand’s Made Easy line, including its high smoke point olive oil — simply called “Fry” — received an attempt at millennial-ification, but the font feels too unbothered and Comic Sans-adjacent to achieve that status. I look at that bottle and I think, Are you friends with Clippy from Microsoft Office? And I hope so, because I truly prefer these aesthetics to those of all the new brands with visual marketing at the forefront.

It feels like we are turning a corner toward a lo-fi aesthetic pivot, with companies such as David protein bars presenting products in plain, gold wrapping with a basic serif font. As discussed in a recent installment of Jonah Weiner’s style Substack Blackbird Spyplane titled “Millennial Rebrand Syndrome,” there’s newfound appeal to products that are, by today’s standards, under-designed — Yousef Gourmet Foods is cited as a particularly potent example, with Weiner writing, “The label looks like it was printed on an inkjet, with some clip-art palm trees tossed in to keep things lively. There is no cartoon of a bird juggling garbanzo beans. There is no copy involving the phrase “Mind. Blown.” That’s how you know the hummus is yanking.”

In an Eater article on the trendy olive oil movement, Jaya Saxena touched on not only optimism as a selling point with cool kid EVOO, but the ability to signal status and escapism, writing, “coolness becomes a gateway for quality, and a way to signal both virtue and indulgence. Or just a way to get consumers to buy olive oil at all.” But can the average person, or the vast majority of people, really taste the difference between my extremely 90s-looking olive oil and one that cost twice as much but came in a millennial-sage-green squeeze bottle? Probably not.

As demonstrated by the recent “Millennial Rebrand Syndrome” discourse, there seems to be an exhaustion with the overemphasis on presentation and a yearning for authenticity, whatever that is at this point. As brand strategy consultant Eugene Healey explained on TikTok about this vibe shift, “In the millennial era, authenticity meant a sort of earnestness and optimism that tried to appeal to some underlying, common humanity. Those traits are now being recontextualized as a sort of cloying self-importance.”

The thing is, I don’t want to put my detergent in a glass jar from Home Goods, for the same reason that I don’t need to feel like a girl boss when I buy my EVOO. It feels fair to say that I want to buy good products from brands making good choices. But give me the unstudied, and unbothered aesthetics of Ken’s Ranch and Carr’s water crackers in lieu of cookie dough that comes with a horny imperative, or navel-gazing EVOOs. Let me cook my chicken piccata with Pompeian olive oil, and still have permission to like myself.