Molino & Cata: Year 1

A year ago we had a Shopify store, zero audience and a plan nobody else knew about. Today we can talk about it.

We are Jerónimo and Mercedes. And this article is an accountability report.

The plan

Everything we have done this year has been about testing things, gathering data and buying time. Time to truly understand how extra virgin olive oil is marketed. Not the pretty version. The real one.

We let people support us and we let them make it hard for us. That was part of the plan. We needed to see the system from the inside before moving a single piece.

And what we have seen is a sector with an extraordinary product and a commercial model that does not do it justice. A world where the producer is paid less than the cost of production and the consumer pays without knowing what they are buying. Where quality exists — and it is stunning — but gets lost among middlemen, confusing labels and a market that rewards volume above everything else.

We did not know that a year ago. We sensed it. Now we have the data.

50 iterations

Mercedes spent hours tasting samples, giving feedback to producers, measuring quality. I spent my nights with spreadsheets, funnels and experiments nobody saw. More than 50 iterations to find the levers. Fifty. It is not a figure meant to impress — it is the reality of looking for a growth model in a sector where everyone tells you how things have always been done.

There were months when the only sign we were on the right track was that the data kept saying the same thing. That the model held up. That the hypotheses were confirmed one after another. It is not easy to trust a process when the result is not yet visible. But if there is one thing I have learned in 15 years designing digital strategies for companies — very large, small, and some small ones that became large — it is that the method works if you have the patience not to skip steps. Plan, get data, implement and adapt. It has been around for years. But it requires something almost nobody has: the discipline not to launch too soon.

I have spent years designing operating models for others. Now it is time to prove it with my own hands in the dough.

The quality compass

There is a part of this year that does not show up in the metrics. Mercedes puts it better than I can: when we taste a sample and detect something extraordinary, that does not appear in any dashboard. But it is what sets apart what we sell from what anyone else sells. She has built the quality compass of Molino y Cata. And that compass has taught us something that should be obvious but is not: that in extra virgin, the difference between a correct oil and one that stops you in your tracks comes from decisions made in the grove and at the mill, not in the marketing department.

Everything else — the technology, the funnels, the data — only works if what is in the bottle is worth it.

The problem is not the product

One of the things that has struck us most this year is the distance between the producer and the real reason someone buys their oil. Many producers do extraordinary work in the grove and at the mill. But when it comes time to sell, the reflex is always the same: offer, discount, bundle, Black Friday, end-of-harvest clearance. As if price were the only argument. As if the only way to move product were to devalue it.

Gold. Liquid. With a 10% first-purchase discount and a Black Friday clearance. Fresh from the mill.

Molino y Cata has gone a full year without a single discount. Not one. Stable and growing sales. No sales, no manufactured urgency, no "only 3 left" counter. Just product that is well explained and reaches whoever is looking for it.

Imagine what we would have achieved if we had invented a new sale every week.

Trust, not coupons

It is not that discounts are bad. It is that when they are your only tool, you are saying your product is not worth what it costs. And truly good extra virgin is worth what it costs. The problem is that nobody has bothered to explain why.

Because selling is easy. The hard part is connecting. Building trust. And the hardest of all: loyalty. Having someone come back not because you gave them a coupon, but because they trust what you recommend. That is not achieved with a 20% discount. It is achieved with years of telling the truth.

There are those who still have not understood that we do not sell their product. We are ambassadors for their product. And that difference changes everything: how we present it, how we explain it, who we recommend it to and why.

Communication and access

We have made videos, we have created content, we have introduced a world that most consumers do not know exists. And we will keep doing it. Because if there is one thing we are sure of after this year, it is that the problem with extra virgin is not about product. It is about communication. About access. About nobody explaining it to you clearly.

Take-off

We now have the growth model and the levers to begin multiplying this by orders of magnitude. We know which channels work. We know which message connects. We know where the consumers who are looking for this are and have not yet found us. And now it is time to harness the transformative power of technology to reach them.

Year 1 has been the taxi from the gate to the runway. Checks complete. Instruments calibrated. Route programmed.

Time for take-off. The adventure is about to begin.

Thank you for being there.

Jerónimo & Mercedes — Molino y Cata, April 2026