Ceramics for the Olive Oil Club

From Porto to pride of place in the kitchen, one of your most requested products—the Citizens of Soil ceramic—is here. 

Within months of us launching in 2021, people kept telling us how they’d love to have our oil in a nice ceramic.

At events and tastings, customers would ask about the best way to store their oil and show us different vessels they had used to refill our signature pouches.

When you make a normal glass olive oil bottle as pretty as ours—it’s natural that people want to see what you can do with something that moves more into the homeware space to firmly live in their kitchen.

But if you know us, you know we don’t just launch products without a solid purpose, a connection to the land and community, and a thoughtful look at its environmental impact.

We didn’t start this business as a trend or even as a pure commercial opportunity, so when we decided to look into ceramics, we knew it had to be done right.

Finding the perfect partner. 

We started asking around, and everything pointed to two options:

1) We work with an artist to make single bottles by hand and share (limited to very small quantities, typically under 50), or

2) We go to China. The cheaper, faster, more straightforward route. 

Neither of these really worked for us. One option meant we’d never be able to catch up on the number of bottles we actually need for our growing community, and the other meant we’d lose that traceability and connection to the people and place behind the product.

Enter Portugal. A world-renowned leader in making the highest-quality ceramics, with a craft dating back throughout its rich history.

Here we could find a wonderful happy medium. A small-scale production which could be done by an independent producer, but using some of the machinery and moulds to help make consistent bottle shapes and be able to do many more in many runs for us.

After finding the right partner and working with them on exactly the requirements—mould of our wine bottle shape, texture for grip (but one that wouldn’t stain from oil), easy to clean, neutral in colour, fits the perfect pourer—our founder went out to Portugal to meet the family behind production. Here's that story...

Meet the Salgueiro family.

It’s a rainy spring day on the outskirts of Porto when I drive into what feels like the ceramic capital of the country. I’m headed back from my first visit to one of our incredible producer’s groves in the north east of the country.

I move past the larger warehouses and begin the winding streets of what feels like a residential village. Traditional stone walls form the path and I pull up to the address, which seems more like a family house than the warehouse I was expecting.

As I go through the gate and step inside, I see all the makings of a magically small factory. Beautiful examples of colour vases and pots, as well as darling small statues around, and importantly—a seemingly friendly environment with workers slowly taking care to prepare and finish the pieces one by one.

There are machines here, but a lot is done by people.

Now in their third generation, the company was founded in the 1950s with a focus on producing figurative and decorative clay art. 

By the 1970s, they were also doing pots and vases, and exporting their work to new markets across Europe.

In the early 2000s, the current generation stepped in with brothers Vitor and José Carlos Salguiero, set out to equip the company with the tools needed to adapt to the demands of a changing world, while staying true to its history and roots. A story so similar to many of our multi-generational family olive producers.

How our ceramic is made.

For our project, they sourced earthenware clay from the Aveiro region of Portugal, not far from some of our producers’ groves. 

This earthenware clay is crafted by carefully selecting and blending premium clay with the right silicas. This is to ensure it’s resilient, can be a “forever” piece in a home, but also can hold up to the oil, washing, and using in a kitchen every day. 

You can still see this rough clay on the bottom where we’ve stamped the bottle.

It’s then put in a custom mould and then set to dry. The solid clay is liquidised and poured into the plaster moulds used to produce the bottle, which are then poured out after approximately 50 minutes. After that it's then dried so it can be fired for the first time.

The final step is the glaze, which was an important part of the functionality and also food-safe requirements for something as nutritional as extra virgin olive oil. Two different glazes are applied before the bottle is transferred to the kiln for last time.