About
We started because the shelf was full of everyone else's oil
The idea did not arrive in a boardroom. It arrived in a supermarket aisle in Islamabad, holding a bottle of Spanish olive oil that cost more than it should have and had no date on it anywhere.
Pakistan grows olives. Balochistan has been growing them for a long time, on terraced hillsides and, in places, on trees that nobody planted at all. What the country did not have was anyone treating that fruit seriously, pressing it quickly, bottling it in glass, testing it, and putting a date on the label so you could tell how old it was.
Leaving a corporate job to press olive oil is not obviously a good idea. But the gap was real, and it was not a small one. Imported oil arrives here after months at sea and more months in a warehouse. Ours can be in your kitchen a week after it leaves the mill.
How we work
Three commitments, and we would rather lose money than break them
01
We buy direct from growers
No aggregators, no middlemen taking a cut on both sides. We know which grove each batch came from, and the people farming it get paid properly and on time. That relationship is the only reason we can insist on same-day pressing.
02
We date every bottle
Harvest date, pressing date, batch code. Most olive oil sold in Pakistan carries only an expiry date, which tells you nothing about how old the oil already was when it was bottled. Ours tells you exactly.
03
We publish the lab results
Free acidity, peroxide value, polyphenol content, fatty acid profile. Message us with the batch code on your bottle and you get the report for that pressing. Adulteration shows up in a fatty acid profile immediately, which is exactly why we are happy to hand it over.
What we believe
A country that grows olives should not have to import olive oil, and should certainly not have to pay a premium for oil that is a year older than what it could press at home.
Zayteen is small and intends to stay that way for a while. Growing faster would mean buying fruit we cannot trace, or pressing in volumes that force compromises on timing. Neither is worth it.
If you have questions about a batch, where it came from, or what is in it, message us. Someone who actually knows the answer will reply.