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While Northern California is famous for its wines, it is also full of olive groves, many of which have been owned by the same family for generations. Since 2018, Aishwarya Iyer has devoted her life to persuading the world to appreciate American olive oil through her brand, Brightland. Her trick? Putting it in gorgeous glass bottles with art-adorned labels. “The bottles were a Trojan horse,” Iyer says. “They’re what pulls you into the brand, but what’s inside is magnificent. It was the tactic we used to convert Americans to using better-quality olive oil.” The strategy worked wellpossibly too well. The 375-milliliter bottles, which sell for $37, went viral on Instagram. People took pictures of them on their kitchen counters. They brought them out for their dinner parties. The bottles suddenly became the go-to hostess gift, and one of Oprah’s favorite things. Iyer was thrilled: Today, one Brightland bottle is purchased every minute. And in 2022, the company landed $6.83 million in venture funding to continue growing. But in some ways the beautiful bottles were also limiting. People saw them as precious objects, meant to be rationed for special occasions. And yet Iyers bigger goal is to get Americans to use California olive oil for all their cooking needsand in doing so, to support American farmers. To broaden Brightland’s appeal, Iyer has just launched a new line of products called the Everyday Set featuring an oil for cooking and an oil for dressing salads. They come in a different format: a plastic squeeze bottle. The products are slightly less expensive than those in the glass bottles ($65 for 750 milliliters), although this is still four or five times the price of many other bottles of olive oil on store shelves. But these new Brightland products will soon be sold at Whole Foods stores across the country, allowing the brand to better compete in the olive oil wars. [Photo: Brightland] We love squeezing our olive oil Over the past three years, the squeeze bottle has become the vessel for olive oil. This is partly thanks to Graza, an olive oil brand founded by Andrew Benin in 2022 that has raised $2.8 million in VC capital, which stood out for selling its products in forest-green squeeze bottles. The squeeze bottle format allows you to better control how much oil comes out of the bottle and to squirt it more precisely into frying pans or salads. This is why chefs and home cooks have decanted olive oil into squeeze bottles for decades. (Many brands, including OXO, sell squeeze bottles for this purpose.) It has also been widely used in adjacent food categories, like hot sauce. Graza’s innovation was selling its oil in these bottles wrapped in fun, modern branding. But Graza couldn’t copyright the bottles, since they were already commonly used. And it’s become clear that consumers love the format, as many other brands have started selling their oil in squeeze bottles, including California Olive Ranch, O Olive Oil, DeLallo, and Pompeian. Brightland is among them. In 2023, it launched a pizza oil in a squeeze bottle that was a hit. The company sold out of its first 10,000 units within hours of launching. (Graza’s founder wrote an angry LinkedIn post about how Brightland had created a copycat product, but quickly apologized; Brightland did not comment on the incident.) From this pizza oil launch, Iyer realized that different bottles work in different contexts. “In this case, the squeeze bottle was a little more casual and playful, which is what you want on pizza night,” she says. [Photo: Brightland] The New Olive Oil Aisle For Iyer, it’s been interesting to observe how the format of the bottle has shaped people’s perception of the oil inside. With the glass bottle, people saw Brightland as a luxury or art object. But Iyer wants consumers to reach for high-quality California olive oil whenever they’re cooking or making a salad. “I live in California, and I feel really passionately about supporting these farmers who are just a couple of hours north of us, and who have had these farms for several generations,” she says. “If we don’t cultivate demand for their oil, it won’t exist much longer.” Iyer also points out that California has the highest quality standards when it comes to olive oil. As has been well-reported, many olive oils in the grocery store are adulterated with cheaper ingredients, like palm or canola oils. Some olive oil that is purportedly made in Italy actually comes from other countries, like Morocco and Tunisia. But the California Department of Food and Agriculture has high standards, and products made here are regularly tested to ensure they are pure. Iyer wasn’t sure she would be able to get the prices any lower, since domestic olives oils are higher in quality and the cost of labor here is higher than it is overseas. But she found a farm that was able to manufacture at scale for Brightland, which helped bring down the price a little bit. At $65 for the pair of bottles, this olive oil is much more expensive than the average American is used to spending. Graza’s oil bundle, for instance, which comes from Spain, costs $37. Iyer believes there are some consumers who will recognize the value in Brightland’s offering. The brand is trying to tell a story about how much frsher this oil is, and how it contributes to the livelihoods of American farmers. And ultimately, she believes that what is likely to convince them is the taste. That’s why she works with farmers to create a very specific flavor profile, much like winemakers do with wines. “It all comes down to flavor,” she says. “We’re blending varietals to be the right deliciousness right out of the bottle.”
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Sams Club shoppers will soon notice a change to the retailers private-label rotisserie chicken packaging. A new tray means the grab-and-go prepared foods favorite is now more sustainable. The clamshell packaging for Members Mark seasoned rotisserie chicken sold at Sams Club is composed of a top clear lid made from polypropylene (same as before) and a bottom piece made from a proprietary polypropylene and PCR (or postconsumer recycled content). Unlike the old tray, the new one doesn’t use a carbon mineral filler, according to Packaging Dive, which first reported the change. That carbon mineral filler is what gave the tray its black color; with it gone, the now-recyclable material takes on a neutral sand color. Sam’s Club tells Fast Company that 7 bottle caps are repurposed to make each tray, and the new packages result in a roughly 25% reduction of virgin plastic. Sabert, the company that manufactures the clamshell packaging, says the tray was developed with color specialists to mask the natural juices and stains that come from cooking chicken. The tray is also microwavable, reusable, and hand and dishwasher safe. Sabert’s chief sustainability and strategy officer, Richa Desai, tells Fast Company that Sabert is “seeing more customers embrace postconsumer recycled content for food packaging as part of their own sustainability commitments to reduce virgin plastic use.” Like CVS, Target, and other retailers, the Walmart-owned Sam’s Club is working to improve its private-abel offerings as consumers turn to generic brands to save money. For Sam’s Club, though, the competition is especially fierce considering its up against fellow membership warehouse club Costco’s private-label Kirkland brand, which is bigger than Nike. While Costco’s net sales in the most recent fiscal year were $176.63 billion, Sam’s Club reported less than half as much, at $86.2 billion. Chicken could be one small step toward closing the gap. Walmart declined to provide sales figures for its chicken, though in one Reddit thread, users claimed stores sell hundreds a day. Member’s Mark currently prices its rotisserie chicken at $4.98, though prices may vary in store and online, while Costco’s Kirkland brand rotisserie chicken sells for $5.84. Costco’s chicken also comes in a bag instead of clamshell packaging, a change last year that shoppers voiced their displeasure over. While Member’s Mark may have a way to go to reach Kirkland-level sales and cultural resonance, it seems to have at least gained a competitive edge when it comes to rotisserie chickens.
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As Fast Company wrapped up its latest report on the state of the design jobs market, we wondered which companies paid the highest premium for designers. We looked at the 40,000 job listings wed gathered from Googles job search engine, over a period between December 2024 and February 2025, and zeroed in on the salaries that companies were offering to prospective employees across various different experience levels (entry level, 23 years, 45 years, 67 years, and anything above 8 years). We then averaged the salaries for all jobs that a company posted across these various experience levels and identified the seven highest spenders from each of seven categories: architects, game designers, graphic designers, urban designers, interior designers, product designers, and UX designers. The good news: Not every designer needs to be in the latter half of their career to reach the highest salaried heights. The bad news: All architects actually do need to be. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}))}(); Architects Architects face a thankless pay curve: earning a top rate means coming with top experience. All the highest paid positions, mostly at big firms like HNTB and Michael Baker, require senior-level experience of at least eight years. But architecture is also the only type of design we looked at where the top paying employer includes a food companythose upscaled La Colombe interiors dont come cheap. Game Designers As Fast Company has reported, the best door into the world of game design might not be at a gaming studio: Netflix is continuing its push into gaming, and it stands out among hiring organizations for offering the highest salary for game designers with fewer years of experience than bona fide game studios do. But dont count those studios out: CD Projekt Red and Riot Games still make the list of the seven highest-paying companies for game designers. Graphic Designers Graphic designers are typically among the lowest paid in the design profession, but they might top out their salaries the fastest: The most generous hiring companies, with the exception of ServiceNow and Nvidia, dont request senior-level status: Graphite and Crocs only ask for 23 years of experience. And apparently, the Prince Georges Parks Department in Maryland, has enough funding to duke it out with Nvidia for talent. Interior Designers Like architects, interior designers need to come equipped with senior-level experience to command top pay, with no employer among our top seven listed asking for fewer than eight years. And unlike other job types with at least a mild diversity of hiring organizations at their upper limit, all the top organizations seeking interior designers are design firms like HKS and Solize. Product Designers Netflix is the only company on our list to make the highest spot in two separate design categoriesgame designers and product designersand its job listings for senior product designers offer the highest salaries on that list, at an average of $427,000. But Netflixs average salary for midlevel product designers doesnt lag far behind, at an average of $317,000, just after Anthropic, which is sparing no expense to make experiencing Claudes profuse apologies as frictionless and stable as possible. Urban Designers Urban design shows the smallest variance in how much their top organizations are willing to pay, with the narrowest band of salaries at the upper levels. Pay tops out at $169,500, and as you would expect, the most generous organizations are all in the engineering consulting, design, and construction business. UX Designers Tanium is the kind of company that few people outside an IT department would ever interact with but that seemingly every IT department does. It provides an endpoint management system demanding a particularly sophisticated set of UX chops, which it pays handsomely for, and which one doesnt need to be a senior-level UX designer to earn. Taniums top designers can expect to make $377,500 with only 45 years of experience. The list of top-paying companies is rounded out with a few usual suspects, like Google and ServiceNow, as well as Blue Origin, which is probably spending its money well in hiring designers to determine how we get back from space. This article is part of Fast Company‘s continuing coverage of where the design jobs are, including this year’s comprehensive analysis of 170,000 job listings
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