Boulder duo trades tech careers for Portuguese olive oil venture

BOULDER — Four years ago, with the COVID-19 pandemic in full swing, technology entrepreneur Nader Akhnoukh and his family took a risk and moved from Boulder to Portugal.

While settling into his new country, Akhnoukh, who co-founded the marketing-software company Kapost, fell in love — with Portuguese olive oil. 

Around the same time, Riley Gibson, vice president of product at Kaspost, now owned by Upland Software Inc., was considering a pivot out of the tech world.

The two reconnected, and Wildly Virgin, a Boulder-based olive oil company specializing in small batches from generations-old Portuguese farms, was born.  

“The mission is about sharing really high-quality Portuguese olive oil with the world,” Gibson told BizWest. 

“It’s really hard to understand what’s in your olive oil these days. There are a lot of different grades. Everything says extra virgin olive oil, but it’s not always extra virgin. And what you get in the grocery store can sometimes be blends of different varietals, different oils from different countries,” he said. “Often it’s sort of late harvest oils that are from the previous season. It’s not always the freshest.”

With “great olive oil,” Gibson said, “you can really taste and feel the difference.”

In better-known oil-producing countries such as Spain and Italy, “a lot of the olive oil business has become a huge business,” he said. “It’s high-intensity farming practices. They are ripping up older trees to put new ones in that, for good reason, are drought-tolerant. But you lose some of the older varietals, you lose some of the character, and Portugal is a bit slower to adopt” more-modern farming techniques.

Wildly Virgin’s first shipment of 2,600 bottles of olive oil sourced from Portugal’s Alentejo region arrived stateside in September.

“You get a really interesting kind of grassiness, and also more polyphenol,” Gibson said of Wildly Virgin’s first offering. “The polyphenols are what’s in the olive oil that give it some of its health benefits, but they also give you this sort of spicy burn in the back of your throat, which some people love.”

The company’s oil is available for sale on its website, and “just recently we’ve been getting a good amount of interest from small retailers” such as wine shops and specialty food sellers, he said. 

The olive-oil business is a “huge departure from tech, but I think one we both have found really rewarding so far,” Gibson said. “There’s definitely things I miss, but we’ve got to apply a lot of our skills, just like building out the (e-commerce) experience.

During the launch of Wildly Virgin, there “was a lot of learning and missteps. In tech you’re used to trying something, and if it doesn’t work, the next week you can (adjust the) code and change it all. … It’s been really cool to create something that we can see and taste, and I can finally show my kids what I’ve been doing.”

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