Where I learnt to make it

Good olives are only half the work … the rest happens at the mill, in the hours after picking.
Fresh out of my degree at Copenhagen Business School, I went to learn that from Annamaria, in Volterra.

Annamaria has run her olive mill in the Tuscan hills for some thirty years, one of the few women around Pisa to do it on her own. She is a trained panel taster, and that is what she really passed on to me: not just how to mill, but how to judge an oil the way the standard does; to catch a fault, to know when a pressing is right and when it isn't. Doing it properly, she showed me, isn't romantic… It's a matter of precision and timing.

I took what she taught me to Morocco, where my family’s olive trees are harvested by hand, mostly by the women of the region, and cold-pressed within hours of picking.
A thread of women, from a Tuscan mill to a Moroccan grove.

TRANSPARENCY COMES FIRST

I'd rather prove it than promise it. Every lot is tested, and I publish the results in full: free acidity, peroxides, and a pesticide screen of over 400 molecules (all below detection.
The harvest date and lot number are on every bottle.

When one lot didn't meet the standard I'd set, I held it back rather than sell it. That's the kind of oil this is.

Sustainable &

Socially Rooted

We cut out unnecessary intermediaries, forging a direct path from farm to bottle to you. This not only preserves the integrity of the oil, but also ensures fair compensation and reinvestment in local communities.

AMAZAYT holds the whole story in one word.

Ama — "love" in Italian, the language I grew up with.

Zayt (زيت) — "oil," in Arabic.

Two shores of the same sea, in a single name.

And said aloud, it echoes Amazigh: the native people of North Africa, often translated as "the free people."
My mother's family is Amazigh, and it's the part of myself I feel most. Their region, Beni Mellal–Azilal, is where these olives grow.

Love, oil, and roots … which is, more or less, the whole of it.