Jason Gibb and Cathy Rogers set up Nudo in 2005 after buying and restoring an abandoned 21 acre olive grove in Italy’s Le Marche. They gave up successful careers as TV producers to build a business in the Italian countryside, following a hunch that they’d enjoy being olive farmers. So it was that they found themselves heading off to live in Italy, with little more than their one year old daughter, a pair of secateurs and an Italian dictionary.
Their philosophy for Nudo has always taken their love of food as its starting point. Nudo olive oil had, above all, to be the best. As the company has grown and developed and Jason and Cathy have learned more about Italy, olive farming and artisanal food production in general, they have coupled this passion for food with a desire to preserve the wonderful traditional ways of local Italian producers.
This philosophy has found clear expression in their olive tree adoption scheme, which allows people all over the world to adopt an Italian olive tree and receive its olive oil. On the production side, the scheme involves a collaboration between a group of small scale, artisanal olive producers in Le Marche and Abruzzo. Each olive farmer keeps responsibility for the care of their grove, and all the olive oil goes into the Nudo adoption programme. In giving financial security to the olive farmers, the scheme makes viable the traditional farming methods which, quite simply, produce the world’s best olive oil.
You can get your copy of Jason and Cathy’s book, ‘The Dolce Vita Diaries: Stories and recipes from an Italian olive grove’, from the Nudo website or Amazon.
