How Olivelle built an evergreen recipe library that keeps selling
Olivelle does not run a recipe-publishing treadmill, and its library keeps converting anyway. Over the trailing 90 days, more than 2% of the brand's recipe views ended in an add to cart, one of the strongest recipe-to-cart rates in the Recipe Kit customer base. Olivelle refreshes a core set of evergreen recipes a few times a year, usually around product launches, then lets them work.
That comes from treating recipes as an owned marketing channel rather than a traditional food blog. Over nearly 20 years, Olivelle has built a library of practical, evergreen recipes that teach customers how to use its infused olive oils, balsamic vinegars, seasoning blends, and infused salts together.
The result is a library of 346 shoppable recipes that earns its keep between updates, rather than a page count that has to grow every week.
Customers loved the products but did not know how to use them
Olivelle began as a brick-and-mortar shop in Bozeman, Montana, opened by Brie Thompson and her mother Michelle in 2006. A bottle of infused olive oil or barrel-aged balsamic is easy to admire and easy to leave unopened, and early on the brand kept hearing the same thing across the counter.
We love your products, but we don't know how to use them.
That feedback sent Olivelle somewhere most retailers never go. The team built a kitchen in the back of the store and began teaching cooking classes. Brie describes what came out of that.
It became a powerful way to inspire customers, educate them on how to use our products, and ultimately drive sales.
Those classes grew into nearly 20 years of tested, in-house recipe development. The recipes customers browse online today accumulated from that work rather than from a content calendar filled to hit a quota.
We spoke with Brie Thompson of Olivelle about how the library was built, why the team is comfortable letting it run, and how the recipes teach people to cook with the products.
How did Olivelle build a library it can leave running?
Recipes were never a side project at Olivelle, and the production commitment behind them is heavier than the modest page count suggests.
With every product launch, we typically develop 5 to 8 new recipes to showcase how the product can be used.
Every oil and vinegar ships with a featured printed recipe card, new-product campaigns add a mini recipe booklet, and each recipe is written, tested, and developed in-house. What Olivelle deliberately does not do is treat the website like a publishing treadmill.
We also use recipes as an SEO strategy to bring new customers to our website. Rather than constantly publishing new recipes like a traditional food blog, our goal is to build a library of core, everyday recipes that customers want to return to and make again and again.
We typically do recipe photography and content updates 3 to 4 times per year, often aligning with product launches or refreshing recipes for existing products. Allowing the recipe library to continue performing without constant new additions was intentional. We focused on building a strong foundation of evergreen recipes that provide ongoing value for customers.
Those photography and content refreshes happen three to four times a year, usually tied to a launch. Between the cycles, the established recipes keep attracting readers and product activity on their own, which is what lets a small team hold a library of hundreds of recipes without a weekly publishing grind.
One recipe, several Olivelle products, one cart
Olivelle's recipes tend to put a specific flavor at the center of the dish rather than beside it. The Creamy Asian Chopped Chicken Salad is built on the brand's limited-time Wasabi Infused Olive Oil and Ponzu Barrel Aged Balsamic, the Loaded Burger Bowls lean on Olivelle seasoning blends, and the Olive Oil Gelato is constructed around the oil itself. A generic substitute would change the result the recipe was written to produce.
An Olivelle recipe page, with the Recipe Kit card and shoppable ingredient links (live, July 2026)
Many recipes reach for more than one product at a time, an infused oil with a balsamic and a seasoning blend, so a single page can offer several product paths instead of one. That is deliberate.
We focus on teaching customers how to layer flavor using our four core ingredients, infused olive oils, infused balsamic vinegars, seasoning blends, and infused salts. We intentionally build recipes that incorporate multiple products from our line, allowing customers to discover additional ways to use our products together.
Brie ties that directly to basket size, describing recipes that inspire customers to reach for several products that work together rather than a single item.
Do online recipes do the teaching a tasting room does in person?
Olivelle's tasting rooms exist so people can taste before they buy and understand why quality costs more. Asked whether the recipes carry that same teaching job online, Brie is direct about the problem they solve.
A bottle of olive oil or balsamic can easily sit in a pantry if a customer doesn't know how to use it.
Recipes, she says, turn a product "from something they are curious about into something that becomes part of their regular cooking routine." Online, the same content helps shoppers understand the versatility of each product and explore combinations they might not have considered on their own. The product-label QR codes carry the idea past checkout: they "direct customers to recipe collections featuring that specific product," Brie says, "creating ongoing inspiration after they leave the store."
What the library does between refreshes
Because the recipes are evergreen, their value shows up in what happens when Olivelle is not actively publishing. Recipe Kit analytics show the brand's recipe-to-cart event rate exceeded 2% over the trailing 90 days, more than two Recipe Kit add-to-cart events for every 100 recipe views. Across active Recipe Kit merchants, that rate tends to cluster in three broad bands, below 0.5%, between 0.5% and 1.5%, and above 2%. Olivelle sits in the highest band, which is unusually strong product intent for visitors who arrive on educational recipe content rather than a product page.
Rates like this move with traffic intent, product fit, recipe structure, store experience, and how extensively products are linked inside each recipe, so the figure describes reach and engagement rather than a guaranteed return. The recipe-to-cart rate here is Recipe Kit-tracked add-to-cart events divided by recipe views over the trailing 90 days, measured across merchants that had shoppable ingredients enabled and recorded recipe traffic in the same period.
The library is not evenly loved, and Olivelle can see which recipes carry it. Over the last 90 days the most-viewed have been:
- Creamy Asian Chopped Chicken Salad
- Loaded Burger Bowls
- Olive Oil Gelato
- Ginger Garlic Sticky Meatloaf
- Salted Honey Caramel Sauce
How Recipe Kit supports the system
Olivelle uses Recipe Kit to publish and maintain its library inside Shopify. Each recipe holds the ingredients, instructions, photography, and linked products in one structured card, with recipe schema that helps the pages surface in search.
The part that makes the library commercial is the connection between ingredients and products. Olivelle links the branded ingredients in a recipe to their Shopify products, so a reader can add them to cart from the recipe itself, and recipe-view and add-to-cart tracking shows the team which recipes drive that activity. That reporting is what turns an evergreen library into something Olivelle can tune rather than guess at.
Where recipes fit into growing Olivelle
Recipes are not the whole business. Olivelle says its in-store retail experience is still the biggest sales driver, Meta advertising is one of its strongest online acquisition channels, and email drives much of its repeat business. The team sends "one recipe-focused email per week," Brie says, because it "gives customers inspiration they can use in their own kitchens and creates a meaningful reason to stay connected with our brand." Recipes run through every one of those channels.
Recipes are a foundational part of how we grow Olivelle because they help customers see the value of our products, feel confident using them, and continue incorporating them into their everyday cooking.
The biggest impact we see is moving customers from purchasing a single product to building a collection of flavors they can use together. Our recipes naturally encourage customers to think about flavor layering, which often leads to larger baskets and higher average order values.
For Brie, that is the point of the whole library. Recipes are "not just content" for Olivelle, she says, but "an extension of our education-first approach," the same one that started with a kitchen in the back of a Bozeman shop.
Lessons for condiments, oils, and sauces brands
- Build recipes around real customer questions. Olivelle's library exists because customers loved the products but did not know how to use them. The strongest recipe topics come from genuine product-usage problems rather than keyword lists.
- Make the product the recipe, not a garnish. When a specific infused oil or balsamic defines the dish, a substitute changes the result, and the recipe becomes a reason to buy that exact bottle.
- Show products working together. Recipes that combine an oil, a vinegar, a seasoning blend, and an infused salt teach flavor layering and give a single page several product paths.
- Build an evergreen library, not a publishing treadmill. A focused set of everyday recipes, refreshed a few times a year, can keep converting without the cost of publishing every week.
- Connect retail, packaging, email, and ecommerce. Printed cards, cooking classes, product-label QR codes, weekly emails, and online recipes reinforce the same education, and they keep working after the sale.
The same model applies to any product customers need help choosing, combining, or using regularly, from seasonings and sauces to baking products, beverages, and specialty ingredients. More condiments, oils, and sauces stories: Fustini's Oils & Vinegars on turning tasting-room education into a recipe library, Oaktown Spice Shop on converting recipe traffic into product discovery, and Terrapin Ridge Farms on building condiments into weeknight dinners. See recipe marketing for olive oil brands and condiment brands, or browse the full case study library.
Turn the recipes you already have into a measurable Shopify channel
Connect ingredients to products, let customers add them to cart from the recipe, and see which recipes drive the add-to-cart activity, so a library you build once keeps earning between refreshes.
