Eater - The squeeze bottle showdown

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There's plenty of drama to squeeze out of the bottle battle happening on the internet. | Terri Ciccone/Eater 

Welcome to Eater’s Weekend Special, an inside look at what our staff was buzzing about this week

The gods of niche drama delivered this week with a dustup between the olive oil superstars of the aesthetic “shoppy shop” pantry: Graza and Brightland. On Tuesday, Brightland — Aishwarya Iyer’s influential olive oil brand, known for its countertop-worthy white glass bottles — announced the launch of Pizza Oil, an herb- and jalapeno-infused blend that’s intended for drizzling on pizza. 

Pizza Oil breaks from the rest of the Brightland line in one notable way: It’s packaged in a twist-open squeeze bottle similar in design to — you guessed it — Graza. The latter’s hallmark lime-green-nozzled plastic squeeze bottles are the free space on the social media chef bingo card. In true founder fashion, Graza CEO Andrew Benin took to LinkedIn to put Brightland and Iyer on blast. He wrote that “while friendly competition was always welcome, I do view this as a blatant disrespect and am choosing to voice my discontent.” 

In addition to Brightland, Benin also called out Goldi, a new line of Australian olive oil that much more closely resembles Graza in both color and brand identity. (Graza has two oils known as Sizzle and Drizzle; Goldi, with the same yellow-green color scheme, has Smooth and Punchy.) Yet another company, he wrote, reached out to Graza’s supplier trying to buy its exact bottle and molds. So sure, there certainly is some imitation happening. 

But here we might ask: How unique or distinctive can a squeeze bottle really be? Brightland’s bottle does mimic Graza’s in shape and proportion, but its identity still feels Brightland; the colors are different, the branding is different, and the switch-up in design seems to match the use case. And while Graza’s bottle comes with its own innovations (opaque dark green to protect the oil, a handy sealable nozzle), chefs everywhere have been using squeeze bottles forever. There is, of course, also the Huy Fong Sriracha bottle to consider. It’s perhaps one of the most recognizable condiment bottles around, and imitated accordingly — just look at Yellowbird hot sauce or the condiment shelf at Whole Foods. At a point, it’s just the most obvious form to fit the function.

As Snaxshot’s Andrea Hernández pointed out on Twitter, Brightland, launched in 2018, paved the way for trendy new brands like Graza, launched in 2022: “Brightland pioneered ‘pretty pantry’ items to masses — it spawned hundreds of copycats and also helped bring these products out of niche specialty grocers and into more conventional retailers.” Brands like the now-defunct Haus and Oracle Olive Oil then took a very Brightland-esque approach to their own bottles, she added. A bottle reminiscent of Brightland’s also appears in silhouette on Graza’s own website: In a chart, Graza positions itself as fresher, cheaper, and more squeezable than that “overpriced olive oil.” 

None of this was a good look online, where Graza otherwise thrives. As some pointed out, the optics weren’t great: A white man was going after a woman of color over a product she’d been selling for longer, and over something as hard-to-own as a shape. A day later, Benin returned to LinkedIn to apologize to both Iyer and the Graza team, whom he’d individually tagged in his original post, “for letting [his] emotions get the best of [him].” — Bettina Makalintal 

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