About
The founding of Ithaca Bound
After initial trips to Greece and Spain, Andrew Schiestel envisaged a company that would sell Mediterranean-based products, giving people a way to bring more Mediterranean lifestyle and culture into their lives regardless of where they lived.
On a third trip to the Mediterranean in 2020, Andrew (with his dog, Trevor) rented a car in Porto, Portugal, and drove one day from Lisbon all the way into the area of Seville in Spain. (The Andalucía region)
He was in search of finding Mediterranean products & suppliers to begin a company that would make these products available to the masses.
As he was driving down the highway from Seville to Málaga, he became captivated with the endless panoramic sea of olive trees that appeared. His idea was simple at the time—He would try to find the farmer of a given orchard and negotiate to buy, export, and sell the farmer’s olive oil.
He pulled off the highway and walked onto his first olive orchard. He immediately became immersed and deeply connected with the presence of thousands of fantastical-looking and sagacious olive trees spread neatly in organized, seemingly endless rows. There was so much to understand and discover about olive trees and the juice that they produced— Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Andrew didn’t find a farmer on that olive orchard that day. But he did decide that Ithaca Bound would make Extra Virgin Olive Oil available to the world.
And so, the journey began.
After discovering olive oil in 2020
On that initial trip in 2020, Andrew proceeded to visit three Spanish olive oil companies and wrote articles about them at Ithacabound.com.
From 2021 to 2024, he then performed two large-scale Mediterranean voyages. (33 of 36 months) The first voyage, from 2021-2023, was for 23 consecutive months. (two years less two days) The second voyage, which began in 2023, was for another nine months. During that period he visited 12 Mediterranean countries and territories and drank olive oil in 10 of them. During the two voyages, Andrew made other discoveries and started two important projects: Ithaca Bound Languages, which is documenting all of the major languages of the Mediterranean Basin (over 10,000 pages of content is available) and EVOO, the social networking app for Extra Virgin Olive Oil.
In the summer of 2024, Andrew returned to Canada, completing his second voyage of the Mediterranean. (33 of 36 months of travelling and documenting the Mediterranean) Upon returning, Ithaca Bound Imports was created as an importer and distributor of world-class and premium Extra Virgin Olive Oil. And as a circling back of sorts, the first three Extra Virgin Olive Oil purchases that the company made in 2024 were the same first three olive oil companies Andrew visited and documented at Ithacabound.com in 2020.