I’d settled the matter of my everyday extra-virgin olive oil years ago. Usually, I switch between California Olive Ranch and Bono Sicilian, the latter because a chef told me it was his go-to at his restaurant. 

But on a recent trip to the grocery store, the only ones I noticed flying off shelves were green squeeze bottles of Graza Sizzle (for cooking) and Drizzle (to finish dishes). 

This mid-range extra-virgin olive oil, made with Picual olives from Spain, surfaced almost three years ago on a wave of influencer promotion. There must be a reason people love it, I thought. So I, too, dropped $21 on Drizzle to see what the fuss was about. Spoiler alert: It was fine.  

We’re living through the commercialization of foodie culture. That means we have a glut of choices when buying everything from oil, salt, and tinned fish to hot sauce and chili crisp. Like a Gucci handbag or Damson Madder quilted jacket, certain pantry items are meant to be shown off — especially if they’re visible on our countertops. 

Is it all just savvy marketing? Does the quality matter as much as the packaging? And when did the pantry become a place to flex? Or to feel FOMO? 

“Influencer culture has just swept the world, so it’s not even just influencers anymore. Everybody wants to curate their life,” says Alix Traeger, a food and lifestyle creator with more than two million followers across social media. “It’s only natural that the pantry is a victim of that as well. The pantry is so personal. It’s how you cook, and it’s a statement about so much more than just your food. It’s how you eat, your taste, and what you value.” 

Control in a chaotic world

To those who can afford it, food has long meant more than just sustenance. But millennials became the first young generation to spend discretionary income on food, even at the risk of not affording rent, according to Eve Turow-Paul. 

She explored this in her 2012 book, A Taste of Generation Yum: How the Millennial Generation’s Love for Organic Fare, Celebrity Chefs and Microbrews Will Make or Break the Future of Food. Much of it stems from a desire to seize control in a world increasingly prone to chaos, she says. 

“The reality is life is not easy right now, emotionally,” says Turow-Paul, who also wrote the 2020 book Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers, and Our Search for Connection and Meaning.

“For previous generations, terrible things were happening, but there wasn’t 24-hour news, Instagram, X, and all these platforms,” she says. “The mess of the human experience is more visible to people, and that’s really hard to cope with. With a world that feels increasingly chaotic and unpredictable and out of control, what do you do? You regain a sense of control by understanding your food.”

The internet, globalization, and globe-trotting television personalities like Anthony Bourdain have given consumers more access to new-to-them ingredients and cuisines than ever before.

Gen Z has only amplified these trends, says Turow-Paul. They embraced globalized, third-culture food amidst a pandemic, the Great Resignation, and nagging inflation. It’s no surprise that a generation that graduated while the world was imploding might seek solace in “cacio e pepe-flavored crunchy things, rather than going out and spending $45 for a bowl of cacio e pepe,” she says. 

It’s the foodie version of the so-called “lipstick effect,” which theorizes that we spend more on small indulgences during periods of recession.

The path of chef to brand 

In our capitalist, food-obsessed culture, chefs have evolved from a culinary artist representing a single restaurant to a brand ambassador, says Eric Huang, a veteran chef of Eleven Madison Park and Gramercy Tavern and founder of fried chicken joint Pecking House in New York City. That evolution gave us Rick Bayless salsas and chips, Masaharu Morimoto knives, and cookware from Rachael Ray and Ree Drummond. 

When the pandemic shuttered dining rooms in 2020, it forced restaurants to seek new revenue streams. Celebrity chefs like David Chang built out pantry product lines through massive venture capital investments, a key to survival in the cost-prohibitive, ultra-competitive consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. 

In April of last year, Chang’s Momofuku Goods launched a chili crunch — its take on the beloved Sichuan condiment that would spark a trademark controversy — to a 20,000-person waiting list. 

“People realized, ‘holy sh*t, I can make a ridiculous amount of money,” says Huang. “That is, assuming they have “a huge platform, branding and funding.” Huang flirted briefly with bottling Peking House’s beloved hot sauce until he learned how cost-prohibitive and risky it would be for his indie restaurant.

Unpacking the Graza effect

Graza founder Andrew Benin worked previously at Casper and Magic Spoon, where he learned the CPG launch playbook well. He used early cash infusions of $50,000 from Casper co-founder Neil Parikh and $230,000 from various angel investors to help create the product, ramp up inventory, and build the company’s website. 

When Graza launched in 2022, Benin says, its advertising budget went to the disbursement of 300 sets of bottles to influencers like Justine Doiron and Molly Baz. Combined, the two have nearly two million Instagram followers.

During its first week in business, Graza sold out its inventory and raked in $100,000 in revenue. That first year, it made more than $4 million in sales of Drizzle and Sizzle. By the end of 2023, sales topped $19 million. Benin largely credited positive media coverage, including in Food & Wine — though it all started with the influencers.

After I determined Graza oil to be nothing special, I polled my Instagram followers to understand the obsession. A handful said they love it for everyday cooking, in dressings, and drizzled on ice cream. Much like me, many admitted that the social media marketing blitz and FOMO got the better of them. 

“I’m guilty of liking it!” one wrote. “I’m such a sucker!” admitted another. 

Some of Graza’s popularity owes to its bottles, which, Huang says, have an uncanny similarity to sriracha. A handful of Instagram respondents said that the bottle is the only reason they keep buying Graza. “I started refilling it with olive oil from Costco,” one wrote. (Never mind the concern about leaching microplastics.) 

“When you talk about virality with Graza, you have to talk about how they transformed packaging,” says Traeger, author of the forthcoming cookbook Scratch That. “That little change of putting it in a squeeze bottle — no matter if you think it’s inventive or not — changed the game for people who want ease, especially when they’re doing something difficult like cooking.” 

Plus, they can look cool doing it. 

“Aesthetics has a lot to do with it, [to be honest],” wrote one respondent to my Instagram survey. “It annoys me less than other trendy brands.”

I get it. I’m part of the millennial generation, which spends an average of $112.83 per week on groceries, nearly 3% more than the average consumer, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It can feel like every brand is aimed squarely at me when I walk through the grocery store.

Quirky cartoons sip coffee on oat milk cartons and smoke pipes on boxes of tinned fish. Of course I would want olive oil for “cozy days and slow nights,” as the $37 Brightland entices on its minimalist bottle with a gold pour spout. 

New York Times Magazine culture writer Jonah Weiner calls this “affluent millennial-coded packaging” in his Substack, Blackbird Spyplane. The intent, he says? To make huge margins off products largely because they’re considered “cute.” He chalks this up to the venture capitalist mindset that every category needs “disrupting,” to exploit a hole in the market that doesn’t actually exist.  

‘Buying a feeling’

Then again, “buying certain things also means buying a feeling,” says Palita Sriratana, chef and founder of Chicago-based Thai sauce company and pop-up, Pink Salt Kitchen. “You’re reaching for this inspiration, for the aesthetic of the brand as a whole.” 

Sriratana points to Richard Christiansen’s “radical pleasure” lifestyle company, Flamingo Estate, which sells premium botanical products like tomato-scented candles, persimmon vinegar, and olive oil using ingredients from 110 local farms. The company is named for Christiansen’s stunning Los Angeles estate, where everything the brand sells is staged and photographed. 

“By buying that thing and putting it in your home, you’re buying into a piece of that aspirational lifestyle,” she says. 

Sriratana does something similar with her stylish jars of nam prik pao. They are symbols of her story as an American who spent summers at her family’s waterfront home in the rural Bangkok suburbs, where she’d wake up to the sounds of neighbors pounding aromatics and chiles in mortar and pestles to make the day’s curry paste. Growing up in the U.S., Sriratana says that she’d also smear the family recipe on crackers with cheese and dollop it on ice cream. 

“I want to challenge people on how they see Thai food and share why it’s special to me,” she says.

It’s the sort of item that foodies would happily spend $14 on and present on our next charcuterie board or dinner party. “Grocery flexes are luxury that’s kind of accessible,” says Sriratana. “The rich of the rich are still buying designer bags, but that’s so inaccessible to a typical demographic. Everyone has to eat.” 

And within that demographic, plenty of people want to “do everything for the ‘gram,” says Sriratana.

As influencer culture takes over and our social media feeds become algorithm-curated mirrors to things we like, it’s harder to unearth cool, indie products. It’s a reason why Traeger is less inclined to share massive brands on her platforms. 

Interestingly, those with influence seem to include fewer chefs these days. Huang wonders if they are too intimidating in an era that prizes the democratization of pretty much everything. Not to mention that more of us know more about food than ever before.

Turow-Paul attributes our relationship with influencers to a collective loneliness. Chefs represent the “religious leaders, community leaders, the mayor,” she says. Influencers  “replaced strong, IRL friendships,” even if these relationships mostly equate to empty calories. To paraphrase a researcher she interviewed for Hungry, Turow-Paul says, “People go online hungry for apples and they get Apple Jacks, meaning you get that immediate sugar rush, dopamine, but you’re not getting lasting nutrition.”

Huang puts it succinctly. 

“There’s something about good home cooks, not trained chefs, delivering content in an incredibly digestible way, like a 60-second Reel,” he says. “People can just relate to it very quickly.”

No wonder they’re the ones selling us olive oil.