Business Affairs: Island Olive Oil Company

HONOLULU (KHON2) – If you love to cook, chances are you love to use olive oil.

And even if you don’t cook, the folks at Island Olive Oil Company can have you impressing your family and friends in no time with their product line and tutorials.

Angel Foster at Island Olive Oil said, “It’s like being a kid in a grocery store. We got all the different flavors of dark basalt mix, light basalt mix. Pure extra virgin olive oil with aroma.”

Step inside one of Iceland Olive Oil’s two locations in Ward Center or Kailua and it’s like walking into a specialty restaurant in Italy or Greece.

“It has some green almonds but also some cinnamon and paprika. Piqua will have that green tomato with more Spanish-style oil,” Foster said.

Angel Foster said taking over the business was a natural progression, in that it brought together three of her favorite things. Her love of food, travel and sharing.

“My background is art and education. So I like to explain and educate people about how to cook recipes and different things like that,” Foster said.

Angel said it’s more than just being a retail store, she wants to interact with customers and share her love of cooking.

“The really fun things about this business is working with their customers and teaching them recipes to do cooking demos and classes and things like that. When we really started building the business, we started working with a lot of chefs and restaurateurs working with culinary students, it was a lot of fun doing live demos and cooking demos,” Angel said.

But then COVID happened and like many other businesses it was forced to pivot.

It turns out that it opened up a whole new channel for doing business.

“Yeah, we had to change and do some quick fixes instead of making cooking demo videos, we couldn’t do that, so we started making our own cooking videos and our YouTube channel,” Angel said.

“The response has been great. Everyone loves a quick video. And we try to keep the pulse of different food trends by making it very accessible to home cooks and keeping it delicious and easy to make,” said Angel.

Another change born out of necessity was the offering of drive-thru.

With so much flavor to offer, Angel said her favorite part of her job is being able to help everyone from beginners to seasoned cooks find that a-ha moment in the kitchen.

“People can be intimidated by all the different flavors, but we show them different pairings of different flavors and help even the simplest home cooking table with lots of fun and interesting accents for their dishes,” Angel said.

Angel said her recipe for success is the same as it always has been.

Angel said: “It’s having a great team of passionate people working with you being excited about food and loving helping to educate and being a great resource for customers. Are you not afraid to cook? I know, because I think if you have to eat to survive, might as well do something nice?”