What you're looking at
Bread & butter pickles, except we made them out of olives.
Sweet, tangy brine — mustard seed, garlic, sea salt — on a pitted California green olive we grow ourselves. Nobody had ever made this. We know, because we tried to buy it first.
What one bite does
Sweet, then tang, then the part nobody expects.
- First
- The sweetnessThe same warm, mellow sweetness you know from a bread & butter pickle. It arrives before anything else does.
- Then
- The tangRight behind it, with mustard seed giving you little pops of heat and texture. Garlic sits underneath the whole thing.
- Last
- The snapA cucumber goes soft in that brine. An olive doesn't. Ours stay firm all the way through — sweetness and snap in the same bite.
How this happened
It started as a question at the farmers market.
Every Saturday, somebody asks us the same thing: “Do you make anything sweet?” And nine times out of ten, when we ask what they have in mind, they describe a bread & butter pickle. The jar in the door of the fridge. The one on the burger. The one the kids will actually eat.
So we sat down at the kitchen table as a family and asked the obvious question.
Why has nobody ever done that to an olive?
Turns out the answer is that nobody had. Not the big producers, not the specialty guys. So we spent a season working it out ourselves — our own organic green olives, pitted, in a sweet-tangy brine built on mustard seed, garlic, and sea salt.
We took the first batch to the market to see what people thought. It sold out. We came home with an empty table and a list of names asking when the next one was coming.
This is the next one.
— The Makela Family, Santa Barbara
Where they go
Anywhere you'd have reached for the pickle jar.
Straight from the jar
What most of them are for. We're not going to pretend otherwise.
With a cold beer
Sweet and salty against something cold and bitter is hard to beat.
On a burger
Same flavor you'd have picked anyway. Better texture.
In potato or egg salad
Chopped fine. Does the work of relish, with more bite.
On a cheese board
Next to something sharp — aged cheddar, a hard goat, a blue.
As the gateway olive
For the person at the table who always passes on the olives.
Who made them
Grown, picked, and packed on the same land since 1855.
Our family has farmed this stretch of Santa Barbara for ten generations. The olives in this jar were grown in our grove, picked by hand, pitted, and packed at 12477 Calle Real — not bought in, not co-packed, not relabeled.
Storage: shelf-stable until you open it. After that, keep it in the fridge — though in our experience that's a short-term problem.
Before you order
Questions we get asked.
Are they sweet like candy?
How big is the jar?
Are they pitted?
Do I have to like olives?
Why is shipping what it is?
Do you make a black olive version?
Do I still want your regular olives?
One more thing
We make these in small runs, between everything else the farm needs.
Which means the jars come in batches, and the batches go fast. If it says in stock, it's in stock right now.
