Exisqueeze Me: The Era of Everything Becoming "Squeezable"

The American pantry is being rebottled. Olive oil, soy sauce, peanut butter, mayonnaise: category after category is abandoning the jar, the tub, and the glass bottle for the same soft plastic bottle you grab with one hand and squeeze.

One brand proved the market. Then everyone else moved in.

The proof: Graza

Graza launched in January 2022 with two olive oils in chef-style squeeze bottles: Sizzle for cooking, Drizzle for finishing. It sold out on day one and did $19 million by the end of 2023, per Food & Wine. Gross revenue hit $48.4 million in 2024.

Four years in, Graza is the fifth largest olive oil brand in the United States, in more than 11,000 stores, selling a bottle every six seconds, with a reported 24 percent of the category’s 2025 growth. Reports in 2026 have it working with Lazard on a possible $450 million to $600 million sale.

The product inside the bottle is Spanish extra virgin olive oil. The disruption is the bottle. Co-founder Allen Dushi calls the bottle “the best supporting actor in any cooking video.” CEO Andrew Benin says the team tested 300 squeeze bottles before settling on theirs. Chefs have kept sauces in them for decades, and mayonnaise, mustard, and ketchup have lived in them for years. Customers wanted that convenience all along. What nobody had done was build a brand on the bottle itself.

Why the squeeze wins

Control first. A squeeze bottle lays down a thin, even line where a glass bottle glugs.

The second is effort. No knife for the peanut butter, no spoon dug into a jar, no stirring the separated tahini. One hand, one motion, done.

The third is frequency. Oil in a heavy glass bottle reads as special-occasion. In a squeeze bottle it lives next to the stove, gets used daily, and gets bought again sooner. That is the real prize: squeeze is a usage-rate strategy, not a packaging preference.

It photographs beautifully. The drizzle is the ad.

We like this experimentation. Pushing on packaging is real innovation. The question is never whether the format is clever. It is what is inside it.

The backlash

Success at this scale attracts a counterargument, and Graza has a loud one. For most critics, the oil is ordinary, the price is not, and the marketing is doing the heavy lifting. For Joe Rosenthal, it goes further: he thinks the oil itself is bad.

The format is not the problem. The problem is a weak product in a clever bottle.

“I have found Graza’s oils to be disgusting. Earlier this year, my spouse and I spotted Graza at a chef friend’s home. Abby compelled the chef to try it by the spoonful, and the chef, who hadn’t previously tasted it, thought it was utterly terrible. The nature of the oil itself is at the center of any issue I have with the price or the fact that they seem to have flooded the influencer market with bottles.”

Joe Rosenthal, food writer, in a message to LAeats, October 26, 2026

He is not alone. The Takeout, surveying Reddit’s threads, summed up the consensus in one user’s verdict: “Mid tier product, great branding, superb marketing. Not worth the price by any stretch.” Detractors call it the Instagram olive oil.

The price math is the critics’ strongest card. Excellent Spanish extra virgin olive oil can be bought in bulk tins at a fraction of the per-ounce cost; a Whole Foods shelf tag puts Sizzle at $17.99 for 25.3 ounces. In one widely shared price breakdown, an official olive oil taster found the liquid in a cheap bottle and an expensive one nearly identical.

The most telling detail: people finish a Graza bottle and refill it with cheaper oil. The container is the keeper. The contents are negotiable. Rosenthal’s answer is blunt: “I don’t really engage with olive oil in squeeze bottles. If I want to have an oil be squeezable, I buy good oil, and I put it in a FIFO bottle.”

Then there is the plastic itself. Olive oil experts have long preferred dark glass or metal because they block light and oxygen, and a squeeze bottle works against that: every squeeze pulls air back in as the plastic recovers its shape, which speeds oxidation.

Graza’s defenders note the oil is meant to be used fast, not cellared, and the New York Times called Sizzle “the best all around olive oil that you can buy in a store.”

Glass, meanwhile, is still the best home olive oil can have. It blocks light, keeps oxygen out, and puts no microplastics into the picture. In some ways we should have more glass packaging, not less. For olive oil, the format is a trade: convenience now against preservation later.

Graza has been hedging its own bet: aluminum refill cans in 2025, then glass bottles with pour spouts later that year. When the company that started the squeeze era starts selling glass, the era is maturing.

“You can just buy good olive oil in a glass bottle and decant into a good squeeze bottle if necessary. Yes, it’s all hype to need to buy olive oil in a squeezable bottle. I don’t see what advantage you get from that. You’re limited on options, and I assume glass is the optimal vessel for maintaining oil quality.”

Joe Rosenthal, in a message to LAeats, October 26, 2026

Everything is going squeeze

Once Graza showed shoppers would pay a premium for the format, the flood started.

Olive oil. California Olive Ranch, the country’s largest olive oil producer, launched its own Chef’s Bottle. CEO Michael Fox told Olive Oil Times the company “jumped in pretty quickly.” Iliada, Terra Delyssa, DeLallo, Brightland, and Chosen Foods followed, and in 2026 Trader Joe’s put its own squeeze-bottle olive oil on shelves as Main Squeeze, at a reported $10.99. When the format reaches Trader Joe’s, it is no longer a startup story. It is the default.

Soy sauce. In October, Austin-based DOJO launched a barrel-aged Japanese soy sauce, brewed nearly two years in cedar barrels by a women-led family brewery, in a chef-style precision squeeze bottle. Founder Chaz Zayed sells tradition in the liquid, control in the package. Soy sauce may be the format’s most natural fit: powerful, used in drops, ruined by overpouring.

Sauces. Bachan’s built its Japanese barbecue sauce in a squeeze bottle from its 2019 launch, reached $87 million in net sales in 2025, and was acquired by Marzetti in 2026 for $400 million. Momofuku Goods built its September 2026 launch around drizzling. Haven’s Kitchen took the format into the refrigerator case with fresh sauces in squeezable pouches, now in more than 2,000 stores.

Condiments. The condiment aisle was the last shelf the new wave reached, a roughly $12 billion US category where, as Smash Kitchen co-founder Glen Powell put it to Fast Company, legacy brands “don’t evolve because they don’t have to.” Smash Kitchen launched its organic condiments in squeeze bottles in April 2025 in more than 4,000 Walmart stores. At the other end, Molly Baz built Ayoh, loaded mayos in 12-ounce squeeze bottles “just like at the deli,” priced around $10. Same format, opposite strategies, one conclusion: even the most habitual shelf is being rebottled.

Peanut butter and nut spreads. The squeeze-native play is Drizzy, an Australian brand built from day one as a squeezable peanut butter, its peanuts ground extra fine so it drizzles like a sauce. Drizzy entered the US in 2026 in a 19.4-ounce squeeze bottle. The UK arrived at the same idea: Nush launched Drizzly Peanut Butter in October, 100 percent nuts in a squeeze bottle printed with “Squeeze. Drizzle. Love.” It debuted drizzled over frozen yogurt at a London pop-up. Two young brands on two continents, Drizzy and Drizzly, landing on nearly the same name for the same bottle.

Peppertux made the same bet on a different nut, launching a Pistachio Drizzle topping in squeeze bottles into more than 2,100 Kroger stores.

The squeeze test

The useful question comes before any question about the bottle. Would you buy this product in a plain glass bottle, with no clever format at all? If the answer is no, the squeeze is hiding the product, not serving it. No format rescues a weak liquid.

If it passes, the format questions follow: is it dispensed in drizzles, lines, or dollops? Does it need a utensil, a second hand, or cleanup? Is it prone to separating, glugging, or overpouring? If the answer to any of those is yes, the product is a squeeze candidate.

Graza’s real legacy is not a bottle. It is the proof that packaging innovation can open a category, and that a strong product in a new format can change a whole pantry. The squeeze gets you tried once. The liquid gets you bought twice.

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