Elias Cairo, founder, Olympia Provisions

On his path to making high-quality American charcuterie and rebuilding the commodity food system.

If you enjoyed this post, head to the bottom of the page to like or comment so others can find it. Thank you!

Elias Cairo is the founder of Olympia Provisions, a Portland, Oregon-based company crafting artisan meat and charcuterie using old-world techniques and high-quality ingredients that support sustainable farming.

Started in 2009, Olympia Provisions began with selling their salami exclusively at farmers’ markets and in their first restaurant, but has since expanded to include a 34,000 square foot production facility and four additional restaurants in the Portland area. As part of their business, they also manage the Farmer’s Network which builds partnerships for environmental stewardship and community and uses third-party Global American Partnership Certification to stay true to our guiding principles.

Elias and I chatted about his path to making high-quality American charcuterie and rebuilding the commodity food system.

Brianna Plaza: Can you start by telling me a bit about your background?

Elias Cairo: I grew up first-generation Greek-American. My father ran Greek-American restaurants in Salt Lake City, and we also kind of operated a very small working farm. My dad is from the Peloponnese which is a growing region in Greece that is very rural. We had a farm, we made our own liquor, we hunted and raised a lot of our meat, and he ran restaurants. He just loved that stuff — the guy was always gardening or making booze. 

I’d always go to work with my dad. He’d be cooking and I’d hang out with him and it was my favorite thing ever. He passed away when I was 15. I briefly was a professional snowboarder but then I called my mom and said I wanted to be a chef like my old man. I wanted to move to Paris to do this, because I thought I was going to become a fancy French chef. My mom really wanted me to move to Greece, but I threw a little tizzy fit, being like, "Greece is really rustic. I want fancy." She called the church and she got me an apprenticeship in the Swiss Alps.

I landed in the Alps in an area called Obertoggenburg. I was supposed to be there for six months, but I fell absolutely in love with it and did everything I could to possibly stay there. I worked with a wild game processor and after my six-month visa expired, I told them I was going to work illegally. They didn't say no. I stayed there for almost five years and that was amazing, and I did a cooking and literary apprenticeship.

My sister had moved to Portland, Oregon and would talk about how much people loved food there compared to Salt Lake City. I visited her and we went to the farmers’ markets and people were lined up around the block for certain products. I wanted to sell the salami I had learned how to make and my sister didn’t think anyone was doing that. I sold all my stuff and moved to Portland Oregon to start a salami company. I had no money and didn’t know what the USDA was. I took a job as a line cook at a restaurant called Castagna. I could work myself up while working with the USDA at night to try and figure it all out. 

In 2009, we opened the first USDA-approved charcuterie facility in Oregon.

Brianna Plaza: The US doesn't have quite the extensive history of charcuterie making as other places. Why do you think that is?

Elias Cairo: I think we do, it's just distinctively American, right? Things like true bacon and summer sausage and pepperoni sticks. I think that we do have it, but a lot of the time in American cuisine, it's based on profit and speed as opposed to being refined, first and foremost. We created Kraft Singles and England created Clothbound Cheddar. A lot of us in America are focused on make it fast, and make it cheap, and sell the hell out it. Of course, there are niche makers and producers all over the country, and everyone has their own unique facilities. But the bigger producers are fast, cheap, really sweet, and really salty. 

I guess in a weird way, charcuterie is value-added meats, right? So a roast beef, in theory, is value-added. I've had some Texas barbecue that has blown my mind and I've had some Kansas City ribs that I've been like, "Oh, that is some of the best tasting meats," but it's not refined. It's just really delicious. I've had some really good sausages in Chicago. It's just the vast majority of what we think of as charcuterie, like baloney and salami is just really mass-produced and there isn’t a lot thought behind it.

Brianna Plaza: You have a production facility to accommodate your products, but you also have a small group of restaurants. Why did it make sense to focus on both at once?

Elias Cairo: I guess in a weird way, I never thought that the meat production would turn out to be as big. I just wanted to make really, really high quality charcuterie for my restaurants and be able to sell it to my restaurant friends and at the farmers’ markets. 

I've always worked in restaurants, and it just made sense to me. But once I started winning national awards and people started asking for my product in Italy, and it sold pretty well in New York, I was like, “Is there a way to continue this?” I don't want to just make a really gigantic, mass-production salami factory. I'd say Olympia Provisions is one of maybe two or three in the nation that actually make our product vs co-pack — we don't outsource.

The way we look at this meat plant is, yeah, it puts out a lot of meat, but it's also just like the kitchen, is the really handmade lovely place. We're picking thyme, we're hand butchering animals. We're using real smoke. You picture a factory, sometimes you picture a very sterile environment, and I just don't believe it has to be this way in food manufacturing. You can listen to music. We all sit down every day and we eat lunch together. We have coffee at the end of the day. We all get beers. 

Brianna Plaza: Tell me more about the Farmer’s Network, what it means for your business, and why it felt like the logical evolution of a business like yours. 

Elias Cairo: It seems like an evolution, but it's always been part of the plan. I started it in 2009, the year I started Olympia Provisions. The Farmer’s Network celebrates small family farmers and builds partnerships for environmental stewardship and community. The Network uses the third-party Global American Partnership Certification to stay true to our guiding principles. GAP uses independent, third-party certifiers to audit farms and verify compliance to their standards of animal welfare every 15 months. All levels of GAP Certification prohibit both farrowing crates/gestation stalls and the use of antibiotics or hormones. This enormous effort across the supply chain ensures we are getting the highest quality pigs from a new network of caring farmers, dedicated to environmental stewardship and humane animal treatment.

We've always worked with as good of pork as we possibly could, and we would try to work with smaller farms, raising pigs on pasture, with a diverse diet. You could instantly tell that it was a much better product. My goal is to make the best charcuterie in the world, not only America. And to do that, you have to start with actual healthy, happy animals. I will never, ever be able to create products as good as I want until I have pigs in pasture doing the exercise, eating acorns, and being handled well. I believe that torturing animals is so fucked up and people can go fuck themselves if they think that torturing pigs makes you a profit. You can't do that. Animals are beautiful, beautiful things. They deserve space. They deserve respect. 

And then there’s the environmental impact of the way that we're raising animals. I have a feeling we're going to look back at this in 20 years in America and be like, "Whoa, are you kidding me? We used to have all of our pork in confinement, in big septic ponds where they're just absolutely harming the world. What are we doing here? Why were we doing that?" I hope we're going to change.

There’s been such an improvement for cattle in America, and for sheep and chickens as well. When you go in anywhere, there’s cage-free chicken, grass-fed beef, grass-fed lamb. You go to the market and you see it. But for some reason in pork, we're still like, "This is the cheapest, most commodity thing," and they're some of the most brilliant, beautiful animals that do just as well, if not better, in all environments, so I don’t really understand why we’re so late to adapt to this. 

I see it in this field and it’s just wrong. There are maybe one or two people I can have conversations with about actually sourcing and trying to change it for the better, but the rest of the industry are trying to hide it, mask it, greenwash the hell out of it, make it cheaper. 

Brianna Plaza: In 20 years, you believe we’re going to look back at our commodity farming products and be shocked. But I’m not sure it’s possible to remove ourselves from the commodity system in this country. Why do you think it’s a reality?

Elias Cairo: I do. When I talk about the biggest change, I think it’ll be first in the people that think that they can't afford it. In pork industry right now, label transparency is my biggest thing. The people that are going into the boutique places thinking they're supporting a good cause, and they're not. If we just start right there, that would be a big step in the right direction. Almost 99% all pork raised in America has never seen the day light of day. They can't turn around, their ears are clipped. They're fed antibiotics, even though it's labeled otherwise. 

If you told everyone that can afford more expensive food that they’re often just getting bottom-of-the-barrel pork, I think that would make a big difference. There just has to be more transparency.

In my mind, it'll take much longer for it to be extremely affordable. But I do think that. the cost saving of putting animals in confident to save money is a bunch of crap. The only thing that they’re saving a lot on is on labor since the feeding is automatic and the poop just gets dumped into a septic pond.

Farming done on proper rotation on pasture, without antibiotics, add up to the cost. So a lot of this conversation is about infrastructure as well. I do think that in 20 years, that there will be a lot more subsidies for people who are trying to farm the right way. Take carbon sequestration, for example. We provide other farming subsidies, so why wouldn’t ’t we do it with one that is proving to actually help the environment? We’re giving out a lot of the wrong farming subsidies right now, and if we switched it and were to incentivize farmers to use less antibiotics, using less herbicides and pesticides, it would be a movement.

In 20 years, I think there'll be more conversations around this. Do I think we'll be fully there? No, but I have a feeling there'll be a lot more conversations. 20 years ago, grass-fed beef wasn’t really talked about. But now, there’s a lot more conversation around it. So yeah, I'm optimistic.

Brianna Plaza: How do think about the inherent higher cost of products from the Farmer’s Network and growth as a business?

Elias Cairo: It's hard for sure. To me, the thing that I had to do is carcass utilization. How do I manage all these byproducts from these beautiful pigs? What is the way that I can get the most value from every single one of these cuts? Currently, it's easy to sell all my pork chops to Kann, which is a James Beard restaurant here. They can afford it. I can sell my salamis and other high-end things at a higher price point. 

We’re starting to use more of our byproducts in the pet treats industry. So far, it’s good, but I need to figure out how to scale that. Right now, I'm maxed out on selling all of my high-end cuts. I can sell pork shoulders, belly, loins, salami to everybody, but I need to figure out how to move my even more lard and pet treats to everyone else so I can grow it. It's a nice steady march for me. I don't want to grow it too fast that I put farmers at risk, so I have to balance it 'cause there'd be nothing worse than harming a farmer doing it the right way. I hope in the next three to four years, at least 80 to 90% of all the pork in which I use will come from small family farm in the Pacific Northwest. But to do that, I got to sell a lot more pet treats.