Holy Smoke olive oil to be sold nationally

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A local olive oil company has secured a contract to sell its products in Harris Teeter grocery stores nationwide.

Holy Smoke, founded in 2012 by Max Blackman and Kyle Payne, has been selling its olive oil in local Harris Teeter stores for about 2 1/2 years, Blackman said. Harris Teeter began selling the olive oil nationally on Monday.

“I just pushed hard,” Blackman said. “‘Hey, you know, we’ve been selling, we’ve been in here for 2 1/2 years selling olive oils. Let us get a chance and give us — review our product to actually go on the olive oil shelf.’ And they reviewed it and they were like, ‘OK.’”

The company’s smoked olive oil — as well as its smoked bloody mary mix, smoked honey and smoked black pepper — is also sold at the Charleston Farmers Market, Charleston-area gourmet shops and Central Market, a gourmet grocery store chain in Texas.

Blackman and Payne import the olive oil from California and cold smoke it through a proprietary process using a machine they designed. Payne said the smoking process takes about eight hours.

Holy Smoke uses a cold smoking process, keeping the temperature below 60 degrees, because the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control requires it; raising the temperature of olive oil and bringing it back down can make it go rancid.

Although the company is growing, Blackman and Payne are reluctant to outsource the olive oil smoking process.

“We don’t want to give anybody our secret on how we smoke it, and also we would feel cheap,” Blackman said. “What integrity would we have if we are saying we’re creating a product?”

He added that Holy Smoke uses a contract packager to make its bloody mary mix because the company doesn’t have the right equipment for the job; but Blackman and Payne developed the recipe. The smoked honey and smoked black pepper are smoked in-house.

“We’re putting ourselves into this and we know what we want it to taste like,” Blackman said. “It’s not like a robot creating something. We’re actually just the two of us that created this product and we like making it and we like the fact that we’re a part of it.”