OUR STORY
We like to say it all began with an olive.
In 1991, our founders and best friends since school, Adam and George were visiting George's mother, Ailsa, in Provence. Wandering through a local market, they stopped at the stall of Monsieur Soler, who handed them an olive unlike anything they'd tasted before.
It wasn't just better. It completely changed their expectations of what an olive could be.
Britain wasn't eating olives like these, so they decided to bring them back home, to England. Ten buckets of olives to be precise. Before long, those olives found their way into the kitchen of their first customer, Fasta Pasta in Oxford. The Fresh Olive Company was born.
George had trained as a chef, first at cookery school in Paris before working at La Taillevent and later at The Capital Hotel in London. He understood what professional kitchens needed: ingredients with exceptional flavour, consistency and provenance.
Armed with a Yellow Pages, a van and plenty of determination, Adam and George began delivering olives to restaurants across the country. Chefs quickly took notice, including Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons. Those early relationships laid the foundations for something that still defines Belazu today.
Our roots are, and always have been, in professional kitchens.
That first olive sparked something much bigger.
Over the following years, George and Ailsa travelled across Europe and North Africa searching for producers who shared the same obsession with quality. Along the way they discovered Beldi Lemons, Rose Harissa, single-estate extra virgin olive oils, beautifully aged balsamic vinegars of Modena and countless other ingredients that deserved a place in great kitchens. The relationships they built with these suppliers then, Eduard in Catalonia and Alessandro in Modena, are still going strong today.
As our range grew, so did the number of chefs cooking with our ingredients.
In 1998 we opened a stall at Borough Market, where conversations with customers became just as valuable as conversations with chefs. We talked about flavour, provenance and how people wanted to cook at home. Those conversations shaped our next chapter.
We wanted to bring the same ingredients trusted by chefs into home kitchens.
The same quality, knowledge and experience, just made more accessible. Today you'll find Belazu in 2,800+ professional kitchens across the UK, including across 48 Michelin stars, as well as on the shelves of Waitrose, Sainsbury's, Tesco, Ocado, Marks & Spencer and independent food retailers.
More than 30 years later, the purpose hasn't changed. We still search for ingredients with remarkable flavour. We still build long-term relationships with growers and producers. We still develop products alongside chefs, because they're the people who challenge quality more than anyone else.
