Throughout history, the olive has symbolized immortality and fruitfulness, its lore and magic still evident today in the tale of a California olive grower named Craig Makela. This restless soul has found abundance and happiness at the end of a journey with more twists of serendipity than the roots of an olive tree.
Nestled in the rugged mountains of Santa Barbara, California is The Santa Barbara Olive Company owned by growers, Craig and Cindy Makela. Although their gourmet food products are now available in over 30,000 retail stores, the company came from humble beginnings and climbed a rocky uphill path with fate as its only guide.
A native of Santa Barbara, Craig Makela had always dreamed of working with the land and soil as if it were in his very blood. His aspirations to become a winemaker led him to the Santa Barbara Winery as a young man. Despite his college education, Craig took an entry level position at the winery where he started out scrubbing wine barrels. But he watched and listened, learning everything he could about the business and after just two years with the company, Craig had moved up to an executive position in marketing.
In 1981 Craig met the woman of his dreams, Cindy White, also a marketing executive. “It was love at first sight,” Craig smiles. “She was just too beautiful. She had patience with me.” The couple was married and soon after started a family.
The following year, some of Craig’s friends owned a startup, gourmet olive company and were struggling to keep their partnership together. They offered to sell the business to Craig and Cindy. Although Craig had a successful career in the wine world and knew little about olive growing, he quit his job and bought the olive company on a whim that would change his life forever. For $15,000 the Makela’s now owned a small orchard of authentic Santa Barbara olives, a setup of crude bottling and processing equipment and a micro business with just a handful of customers.
For two years, the Makela's ran the Santa Barbara Olive Company out of a tiny, one-car garage and could barely make ends meet. But their persistence and marketing savvy finally paid off when the Neiman Marcus catalog placed a large order for the company’s specialty olive gift packs, putting the home-based olive business on the epicurean map of the world. Hiring high school students to help fill the deluge of orders and even utilizing their four-year-old daughter to help with labeling bottles, the Makela’s had finally tasted success.
With the business prospering, Craig and Cindy decided that it was time to expand their operation. The couple leased a small trailer on several acres of rocky and barren land in Santa Barbara where Craig single-handedly planted a grove of five-hundred olive trees. Just as their dreams and their olive orchard began to flourish, a stranger showed up on the property one afternoon demanding that they vacate the premises immediately. The Makela's discovered that the people they had leased the property from hadn’t actually owned the land and they’d been mercilessly swindled out of their dreams.
Even with the business in shambles and losing everything they had including the trees, the Makela's refused to give up and sowed their seeds once again in a new orchard. Struggling through the next year with little stock, the superior quality of their organic Santa Barbara olives continued to win them loyal fans including President Ronald Reagan who sent gift packs of their famous olives to world leaders that very Christmas. Another devoted fan of the Santa Barbara Olive company was famed chef, Wolfgang Puck. Craig recalls driving his battered old truck down to Puck’s first restaurant in Los Angeles to deliver half gallons of his sun dried olives for the chef’s gourmet pizzas.
With their line of specialty olive products growing in popularity, the Makela’s managed to save enough money to open a small wholesale showroom in the neighboring village of Solvang. No sooner had they set up shop, the Makela’s were bombarded by people knocking on the door asking if they might come inside to sample the products. Always generous hosts, Craig and Cindy allowed these curious strangers through their doors and soon after decided to turn the showroom into a gourmet food store. The Santa Barbara Olive Company Store was born and their grand opening ribbon was cut by none other than chef, Julia Childs, another fan of the Makela’s gourmet olives.
Meanwhile Cindy’s days were divided between product marketing and home schooling their three children. With the business and shop thriving, Cindy was able to hire a tutor for their young children. The tutor had the Makela boys create a family tree, a project that would ultimately define the very soul of the family.
The boys traced their local family heritage back to Luis Quintero, one of Santa Barbara’s founders. In 1779 King Carlos III of Spain issued orders to establish a town in Southern California. Forty four people known as pobladores, or settlers made the journey from Sonora, Mexico to Southern California. Luis Quintero was one of the settlers traveling with Governor Filipe de Neve and Father Junipero Serra, the founder of the Mission of Santa Barbara. For his service to the King, the Spanish Government granted Luis Quintero a large parcel of land in Santa Barbara. Quintero married the daughter of a Spanish soldier and together they raised three generations of Quintero’s on their homestead in Santa Barbara.
Maria Caneda was a beautiful woman of Spanish blood and a fourth generation Quintero. In 1860, Maria met a traveling Frenchman named Jules Emile Goux, an aspiring perfumer who had sailed around the Horn with his colleagues, gathering plant cuttings from around the world. Goux had collected samples of mulberry trees, olives and grapes and was headed north on the Camino Real to San Francisco where he and his companions were to depart for France. But as fate would have it, Goux attended a gala party in Santa Barbara where he met Maria Caneda and the couple fell madly in love. Saying goodbye to his traveling companions, Goux stayed behind and married Maria, carving out a life for himself in the rugged coastal community. Among his many successful ventures, Goux established Santa Barbara’s first vineyard, the T.A. Goux Winery and planted acres and of olive orchards, establishing himself as the first commercial olive grower in the United States.
As the owner of The Santa Barbara Olive Company, Craig Makela was astounded to discover that he was related not only to Luis Quintero, one of the founding fathers of Santa Barbara, but that he was also the great, great grandson of John Emile Goux, the man who was Santa Barbara’s first winemaker and who planted the city’s first olive groves, using cuttings from the Spanish missions. For the first time in his life, Craig understood why he had been compelled to work the soil of Santa Barbara – it was in his blood.
The extraordinary Makela family history attracted attention in the local media and olive sales began to soar. Envious of their success, a competitor in the olive business filed a lawsuit against the Santa Barbara Olive Company for cooking up a fraudulent family history. But after Craig and Cindy provided historical documentation, undeniably proving that their lineage was the real deal, the lawsuit was thrown out by the judge.
The Makela's went on to expand their business, purchasing 101 acres of land in the rugged Santa Barbara Mountains. Craig took one look at the barren hillside and was overcome by the feeling that this was the place he was meant to be. Working diligently, he cultivated cuttings from Santa Barbara’s original olive groves and planted 5500 new trees.
Craig’s strong affinity for the land turned out to be more than just a feeling - for the Makela’s were about take another drive down Serendipity Street. Out of curiosity, Cindy decided to conduct a title search on the history of their new property and what she discovered was no less than astounding. The very groves the Makela’s now owned had once belonged to Craig’s ancestor, Luis Quintero and the property had been part of the family’s original homestead back in the 1770’s. If that bizarre coincidence wasn’t enough, Craig met two of his neighbors that turned out to be his long lost cousins. The ancestors of the Quintero family were finally reunited after being separated for over eight generations.
Permanently rooted on their own land, the Makela’s built their dream home on top of the mountains overlooking their orchards and the grand Pacific Ocean. The gourmet kitchen offers sweeping views of the sea and a panoramic view of their herd of Black Angus cattle grazing the hillside. The Makela’s keep a stable of livestock including goats, sheep, chickens, a pet pig and even Frank Sinatra’s 35 year old horse, Frankie. The Santa Barbara Olive Company is a certified organic farm and the manure from the Makela's livestock is used to fertilize the groves of olive trees that flourish on the orchard.
Even though the Makela’s were abundant with success, Craig still dreamed of starting his own winery. Cindy encouraged him to go ahead and plant his vineyards on the property and fate stepped in once again. The only grapes that were available at that particular time were for chardonnay and were only suitable for coastal regions. The grapes were a perfect match for the steep, rolling hills overlooking the sea and the Makela’s named their vineyard Olivos del Mar, Spanish for olives of the sea. Famed winemaker, Chris Whitcraft made the first wine from the Makela’s vineyards and has produced six hundred bottles of the Olivos del Mar Chardonnay. Whitcraft believes that this chardonnay is the finest he’s ever created and the Olivos del Mar is in such demand that Whitcraft will only sell one bottle at a time to buyers.
With his roots deeply planted in Santa Barbara, Craig Makela became the Vice President of the Santa Barbara Historical Preservation Committee and took an interest in the historical Mission of Santa Barbara. Founded in 1786 by the successor of Junipero Serra and Craig’s ancestor Luis Quintero, Craig noticed that the original olive groves that once graced the lands no longer existed. In 2006, Craig and Cindy Makela planted a grove of 100 olive trees in the Meditation Garden on the historical Mission grounds. In a few years the trees will bear fruit and the Santa Barbara Olive Company has agreed to care for and process the olives and produce a private label line of Santa Barbara Mission Olive Oil. Visitors to this historical California landmark will be able to take home a taste of authentic Santa Barbara history.
With a thriving gourmet olive business and a budding winery, Craig is a true believer in fate. “I’m like the Forrest Gump of Olives,” he says with a grin. After spending a day with the Makela’s, I’m convinced that you couldn’t find two more generous people – who lead a truly charmed life.
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