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Brie Thompson has a long history of cooking with her mother, Michelle Schaffer.
Born and raised in Bozeman, Thompson and her family participated in cooking competitions at local fairs throughout her childhood. Schaffer’s apple pie was a consistent winner, but she once won a national spam cook-off by burying the spam in her homemade pot pie.
Years later, the mother-daughter duo founded Olivelle, a specialty food brand that makes infused olive oils, balsamic vinegars and spice blends — all crafted in Bozeman.
Some of the infused olive oil sold at Olivelle. Small plastics cups of the oils are displayed alongside small pieces of bread to give patrons a chance to taste-test the products.
The idea for their business started when Thompson was a student at the University of Montana. She found an olive oil store in Missoula and filled a wooden bowl with olive oil, pasta, vinegar, olives and seasonings then gave it to her mom as a gift.
After Thompson graduated college, they decided to bring that concept to Bozeman.
Their business started in 2006 as Oil and Vinegar, a franchise of a European company, but the company pulled out of the U.S. five months after Thompson and Schaffer opened their store.
“We had literally mortgaged (Schaffer’s) house to start this store,” Thompson said. “And then our entire supply chain disappeared overnight.”
But Oil and Vinegar’s absence gave them the chance to pivot and start creating their products based on their high culinary and health standards.
ABOVE: Michelle Schaffer and Brie Thompson, co-founders of Olivelle. BELOW: Some of the Olivelle seasonings on display.
When they first started sourcing their own products, they realized a lot of the olive oils they were receiving had defects and didn’t live up to their standards. They started working with extra virgin olive oil suppliers and learned how to infuse the oil with their own flavors.
“We started taking these high-quality oils and enhancing them and making them even better and more intriguing with other flavors,” Thompson said. “And that’s what kind of grew our manufacturing.”
They started manufacturing in the back of their store at first. As they got bigger, they moved the operation to their first warehouse. Their local manufacturing facility now has over 20,000 square feet and three different buildings.
Their manufacturing facility sees all the action: Everything from crafting their seasonings and infusing the oils to packaging online orders and preparing the “bladder” bags of oils before they’re shipped out to artisan cooking stores that stock Olivelle’s products.
“It’s kind of crazy, the scale of what we do,” said Nicole Lemon, Olivelle’s maketing manager.
Olivelle has just over 40 local employees total, with 28 working in the manufacturing facility. Olivelle focuses on lean manufacturing, a production process that cuts out as much waste as possible and prioritizes efficiency, according to Lemon.
Large bins of olive oil before they’re infused with different flavors.
Two of the facility’s employees only work on infusing the oils and balsamics, which account for 70% of Olivelle’s sales.
But that’s not all they’re focused on.
When the store was still young, Schaffer and Thompson learned that people in the Bozeman area wanted an immersive culinary experience. Thompson met a customer who loved the products but didn’t know how to cook with them — so Thompson gathered all her cooking supplies and drove an hour outside of Bozeman to host a cooking class at the customer’s home.
“Oil and vinegar is just as much about learning how to use the products as it is about just being inspired in the kitchen,” she said. “Our entire business has been built around inspiring others.”
Olivelle currently hosts roughly nine to 12 cooking classes a month, taught by a rotation of different chefs.
In August, the store held a variety of two-hour weeknight cooking classes centered around different themes. Sunday Pasta Supper, Tomato Season, Tapas Tasting and Mad for Margaritas were some of the available events.
People can also book private classes for things like work events or bachelorette parties, and Olivelle donates cooking classes to be bought at auctions.
In the beginning, Thompson was teaching a lot of the classes herself alongside the chef they hired when they started.
“The highest month I ever had, I personally taught 19 classes in one month,” Thompson said. “I think I was trying to save up for my wedding.”
Olivelle creates recipes for all their products and turns them into recipe cards with photos of all the food. The recipes range from entrees like marinated chicken and braised fish to desserts like lemon raspberry cheesecake and toffee chai chocolate chips cookies.
One of Thompson’s favorite recipes is their white chicken enchilada; a dish she would eat all the time as a child. The recipe she created for Olivelle takes the dish and turns it into a healthier meal.
Olivelle moved to their current location in October of 2023 from their old location on 19th Avenue. In between, they opened a pop-up shop at Gallatin Crossing for the 2022 holiday season, one of their busiest times of the year.
Their new store, located at 1940 West Main Street, boasts a variety of cooking supplies, small appliances, cookbooks, kitchen decor and much more.
Olivelle sells more than just olive oil. Its store on West Main Street has cooking supplies of all kinds, from espresso machines to spatulas to their display of wooden cutting boards.
The store’s showpiece is their display of dozens of infused olive oils, vinegars and balsamics, surrounded by larger canisters on tap. Customers can fill glass bottles of the products and exchange the bottle for a fresh one once they’ve used it up.
Quality olive oil is important to the duo. In an effort to gain customer trust, Thompson enrolled in the Extra Virgin Olive Oil Savauntes program in Chicago, becoming the 12th certified extra virgin olive oil taster in the world.
“In the olive oil world, everyone’s a critic,” she said.
To get certified, Thompson had to blindly taste and identify different regions, different countries, tasting notes and defects in olive oils. She compared the process to becoming a wine sommelier, but with oil.
“Your olive oil should always be fresh and garden-like,” she said.
“That was something that was really important to me,” Thompson said. “That we use the highest quality extra virgin olive oil, even when making our infused oils,” she said.
After twenty years in business, Olivelle’s products have reached 37 states in the U.S. and one store in Aurskog, Norway.
Schaffer and Thompson are celebrating the twenty-year anniversary of the brand with a special sale that runs from Sept. 1 through Sept. 20.
They will also be teaching three cooking classes on Sept. 1, 9 and 14. 100% of ticket sales and 10% of post-class purchases will go to Haven, an organization that supports people affected by sexual assault, sex trafficking, stalking and domestic violence.
Dining and Cooking