How we got our start?

Our story starts with Papa Vince — the cute old man on the label. Everyone in our family called him Papa Vince; that's just who he was. As a young man he apprenticed under the Knight De Stefani at the Castello di Rampinzeri, where he learned the old way of making Extra Virgin Olive Oil and came to know every olive variety in the Valle del Belice.

That valley is my family's home. My mother was born in Castelvetrano. My father was born in Santa Ninfa. They emigrated to Venezuela, where my father arrived with nothing and built a business with his own hands — and where I was born. In 1985, we came to America.

And in America, something strange happened to me: I was tired. Constantly. A fatigue I had never known before. For years I couldn't explain it — until 2012, when I started reading labels and discovered what was really in the "extra virgin olive oil" on American shelves. Most of it blended. Much of it lampante — lamp oil grade. That was my breaking point.

In 2013, I founded Papa Vince and named it after the man who set the bar, because I knew exactly where the real thing was: in my parents' valley, made by family and farmers we know by name.

What makes our product unique?

One valley. One country. One standard. I work with family and farmers of the Valle del Belice — pesticide-free growers, frantoios using 2-phase waterless extraction, only Nocellara del Belice olives. Then I do what almost nobody in this industry does: I send everything to a lab — polyphenols, vitamins, pesticides — and I publish the results right here on this site.

In 2016, our customers pushed us beyond olive oil, and we extended the same standard product by product: real wine and balsamic vinegar from mothers dating back to 1960. Stone-ground ancient grain pastas, slow-dried and bronze-cut, never enriched — because nothing was taken out. Einkorn flour with the wheat germ still in it. Tomato sauce with four ingredients from Ragusa, and not one of them a seed oil or preservative. Sea salt from the shores of Trapani.

Nearly everything comes from two small towns: Castelvetrano and Santa Ninfa. My mother's and my father's birthplaces.

Why we love what we do?

There have been plenty of voices telling us to raise profits by lowering quality. As a family, we decided long ago to pursue excellence regardless — if Papa Vince wouldn't have bottled it, we don't sell it. And somewhere along the way, we stumbled into our destiny: the joy of adding delight to your table.

I'm 61 years old. I haven't needed a doctor in twenty years, and I still ride my skateboard. I'm not a doctor and this isn't medicine — it's just real food, the way my family has always known it.

My customers tell me the same thing, over and over: "I trust your food."

That trust is the whole business. Come see the lab tests — then come sit at the table.