This guy at the market in Mainz has got his marketing mix absolutely spot on

Product.
Olive oil. Nothing else. One variety.

Price
€23 a litre. €13 for 0.5l, €7 for 0.25l

Place
Only at the market. Only on Saturdays. Only 4 times a year.

Promotion (This is the best bit.)

The bottles have a simple, typed label, they’re wrapped in Italian newspapers, he claims that the variety is Olivastra, a heritage olive that grows close to the tree line and is frost-tolerant down to -15ºC.

He’s only got 200 of them.

And they’re 800 years old.

Yeah, right.

He looks just like Catweazle.

With a funny hat.

I’m tempted to believe that he’s a suit like the rest of us during the week, that he dons his Catweazle persona at the weekend and if you look in the back of his van, you find a big pile of Aldi olive oil (€5 a bottle) labels that he’s soaked off the bottles, plus one of those flash banknote counting machines.

Except his olive oil is phenomenal.

Unfiltered, herbaceous on the palate and a long, long peppery finish that never wants to end.

By my reckoning, he’s back in January….

21 Oct This entry was published on 21 October, 2008 at 11:00. It’s filed under Culinary, Mainz and tagged Market. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.