From a family press to a name on the bottle.

Colavita starts in a hill town in Molise, in southern Italy. The company’s Italian website, under a page title that reads “Italian gastronomic specialities since 1938”, says its story begins in 1938 in Sant’Elia a Pianisi, in the olive mill of Giovanni and Felice Colavita. English Wikipedia’s infobox gives the same year and the same two founders, and lists the company today as Colavita S.p.A., a privately held business with its headquarters in Pomezia, south of Rome. The company says the oil from that mill persuaded the next generation, the brothers Enrico and Leonardo Colavita, to put their own surname on it and to sell it beyond Italy’s borders.

The family’s roots in oil go back further than the brand. Writing in Olive Oil Times on 29 September 2010, Lucy Vivante reported that for generations the Colavitas had produced olive oil in the province of Campobasso, and that the brothers’ father had moved into packaging olive oil, as distinct from growing and pressing olives. At the time of that article Enrico was president and Leonardo general manager, joint heads of the family firm, and other relatives worked across the business, including Leonardo’s son Giovanni, then president of Colavita USA, and Enrico’s son Andrea, director of sales.

New Jersey Monthly, in a profile by Tammy LaGorce published on 11 December 2012, described the family’s working methods in the 1970s: Enrico Colavita and his relatives were still making oil the way his father had, with hand-operated presses, but he saw a future in exporting it to the Italian-American communities in and around New York. The same article placed the village not far from Italy’s Adriatic coast. The company’s own account frames the whole history as a journey out and back: the name left Italy with the second generation and, by the company’s telling, returned at the fourth with a wider range of products sold to Italian shoppers as well as abroad.

Brooklyn, Edison and Pomezia.

The American side of the business began with a chance introduction. According to New Jersey Monthly, Enrico Colavita married in 1978 and honeymooned in New York, where he visited a relative in Coney Island and asked whether he knew anyone in the olive-oil trade. The relative pointed him to John J. Profaci, who lived nearby in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and was then working out of a small warehouse in Newark as a broker selling pizza cheese and tomato products to Italian restaurants. That year, the magazine said, Colavita made Profaci his importer, and their agreement was sealed with a handshake. The magazine described Profaci as the founder and chairman emeritus of Colavita USA, and said that in 1980 he visited his new partner’s home in Sant’Elia a Pianisi.

The early selling was slow. Profaci told New Jersey Monthly that he set up a tasting table with bread and a bowl of oil one Saturday at a C-Town supermarket in Harrison, New Jersey, and that the one shopper who stopped found the oil too dark and too strong-smelling. For the next few years he concentrated on Italian restaurants in Manhattan’s Little Italy and in Brooklyn, then on a handful of specialty food stores in New Jersey and New York. His breakthrough with supermarkets, as he recalled it, came in 1984 or 1985, when the food section of The New York Times ran a story about a dietary study that was illustrated with a photograph of a bottle of Colavita; he said he began showing the article to every prospective customer.

Colavita USA moved several times as it grew. The magazine said Profaci took the company from the Newark warehouse to a building in Linden, and then to a site in Edison, New Jersey, where it moved in the spring of 2012. By then Giovanni Colavita, who had moved from Italy to New York in 2008, was chief executive of Colavita USA, and several of Profaci’s sons held senior roles. English Wikipedia, citing the company’s history page, says Colavita acquired Colavita USA in 2008; the Italian family company has owned its American importer since that year.

Production stayed in Italy. Olive Oil Times reported in 2010 that the Colavitas package their extra virgin olive oil at a plant in Pomezia, on the Via Laurentina about 24 kilometres from Rome, and that the same plant also packed Rachael Ray All-Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Santa Sabina, a Lazio brand the family had bought, and Molivo, a brand they created. The company’s plant in Campobasso, the article said, produced flavoured oils and a line of vegetables packed in olive oil, while a plant in Linden, New Jersey, packaged a canola and olive oil blend for American shoppers. New Jersey Monthly added in 2012 that the olives were pressed at various sites in Italy.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sit on three different shelves of the grocery aisle: olive oil, pancake and baking mix, and the salty snacks of pretzels and potato chips. Each category has its own packaging habits, and a brand’s identity is often carried less by the food itself than by the tin, bottle, box or bag that holds it, and by the name printed across the front.

An olive-oil tin or bottle tends to lean on a family name, a place and a sense of origin. A pancake-mix box is built around a front panel that has to be read at a glance, with a picture of the finished stack and instructions on the side or back. A pretzel or chip bag has to work as a flat, printed surface that is folded, sealed and stacked, so colour, a wordmark and a window or photograph of the contents do much of the work.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the business, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A cooking school, a cycling team and a narrator called Olivia.

Much of Colavita’s public profile in the United States has been built away from the supermarket shelf. At the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, the company’s name is on the Colavita Center for Italian Food and Wine. New Jersey Monthly reported that Profaci, already a trustee of the school, agreed the deal for the centre in 1991 and that it opened in 2001; the company’s Italian website also dates its inauguration by the Colavita family to 2001 and calls it a school of Italian cooking. Olive Oil Times wrote in 2010 that the centre, together with the company’s sponsorship of athletes, mostly women, helped keep Colavita’s profile high.

Sport is the other recurring stage for the name. The company says it is a sponsor of teams and athletes and of an all-women cycling programme, the Colavita Cycling Team, and lists a solidarity programme called Colavita Cares among its activities. The company also says all of its plants, in Italy and the United States, are fitted with photovoltaic systems. In Italy the family has been active in the trade’s own institutions: Olive Oil Times reported in 2010 that Leonardo Colavita was a founder of ASSITOL, the association of the Italian oil industry, and had served four consecutive two-year terms as its president, and that the family worked with Federalimentare, the food-industry group within Confindustria.

The brand’s own voice has a light touch. The “who we are” page on the company’s Italian website is written in the voice of a narrator called Olivia, who introduces the company as the story of a journey out and back. The infobox on English Wikipedia lists pasta, olive oil, tomato sauce, soup, vinegar and wine among the company’s products, and names the areas served as Italy and the United States.

For a design guide, Colavita shows how a family surname can carry an olive-oil label from a Molise mill to American supermarket shelves, with a cooking school and a cycling team doing the work of advertising. Compare it with Bertolli, the olive-oil name from Lucca dated to 1865, and De Cecco, the family pasta maker from Fara San Martino; Cento is a New Jersey importer of Italian foods. For this guide we use olive and deep grove with pressed gold on cream with an old-style serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Colavita’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.