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The first cake she remembers baking with her siblings in Ghana fell short of their expectations. Decades later, the Washington state entrepreneur enjoys receiving high praise for her Flour & Olive company, which sells healthier cake mixes made with extra virgin olive oil instead of butter. Looking back, founder Estelle Sohne laughs at one of those early cake catastrophes.
“It looked like it was rising beautifully, but when we got it out of the oven, it had also risen on the bottom and it was as hard as a basketball,” Sohne recalls. “Most of my experiences growing up baking were pretty much unsuccessful.”
Journey into Making a Cake with Olive Oil
Those early baking failures were far behind Flour & Olive’s creator when she acted on her vision for a cake mix company. Sohne’s eureka moment came while walking down the aisles of a grocery store in Palo Alto, California. She noticed one side displayed American cake mixes but no international baking products. The other side of the aisle offered olive oils from Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Tunisia and California. Yet, there were no international desserts or sweets to pair with them.
“I was looking for an idea for a food business, so I had a purpose in mind when I was walking around,” says Sohne. “Being married to a French person, having lived in Ghana and New York, and traveling internationally, I have a broader experience with baking and eating.”
The wife and mother of three decided she wanted to provide international cake baking options to home cooks and give top makers of extra virgin olive oil a way to promote a dessert made with their products.
“Extra virgin olive oil, in particular, is a premium product that manufacturers spend a whole lot of time and energy perfecting. I wanted the cakes to be worth the olive oil that was going into them. I wanted to get each cake mix to a point where it was really exceptional,” declares Sohne.
She knew the characteristics she wanted her cake mixes to have before the December 2023 launch of Flour & Olive in Kirkland, a suburb east of Seattle. “When I’m eating a cake, above all, I want that cake to be delicious, right? If I’m going to spend my calories on it, it better be good,” suggests the CEO.
It took three years of research and experiments for the home baker to fine-tune the master formulas for Flour & Olive’s flagship cake mixes. Most recipes she found for cakes with olive oil were citrus-flavored and had either a pound cake or sponge cake texture. “In order to make these international cakes, I needed to translate ideas for butter cake recipes into olive oil cakes,” says the CEO.
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She applied the science and art of baking until she was convinced she had the perfect mixtures for four flavors of cakes with olive oil: almond, vanilla, chocolate and ginger. “The butter cakes were really good, but the olive oil cakes were just consistently better,” Sohne insists.
The Kirkland entrepreneur continues explaining why her cake mixes contain no artificial flavors, colors or preservatives. “I appreciate the fact that they happen to also be healthier. So our flour is unbleached flour and white whole wheat flour. The baking powder has no aluminum. Most of the ingredients are non-GMO.”
Family Taste Testers and Finding a Logo
Before offering Flour & Olive cake mixes to the public, Sohne made sure they would meet the standards of her family’s cooks. She sent samples and recipe booklets to her mother-in-law in France, her mother in Ghana and her sister in Virginia.
“They would lose the recipe book. Then, they just had the cake mix and would simply make up something. It got to the point where it was almost impossible to mess the cakes up. In addition to being really good when the recipes were made with precision, the cake mixes still produced a delicious cake when that did not happen,” notes the company’s owner.
Having conquered the research, experiments and taste-testing for Flour & Olive cake mixes, Sohne poured her energy into creating a suitable logo. She knew it had to reflect her Ghanaian heritage and international focus on making a cake with olive oil. It took a lot of brainstorming to come up with a logo inspired by the Adinkra hospitality symbol.
The image she designed also represents a word the baker has heard all her life, Akwaaba, which signifies a warm welcome, love, honor, trust and acceptance in Ghanaian culture. “It was a joyful moment because I realized I could bring my heritage into the concept of the cake mixes and still honor the Mediterranean origins of olive oil,” says Sohne.
She sums up the significance of the olive oil flowers in the company’s logo. “The olive oil flowers are both forward and backward-looking. They look back to the historical origins of olives and honor and celebrate that. But they also look forward to new vistas of production and consumption of olive oil.”
The logo appears on the four cake mix boxes sold on Flour & Olive’s website, in some Oil & Vinegar’s Bellevue Square location in Washington State and on Amazon. They are also available through McEvoy Ranch, an award-winning California producer of organic extra virgin olive oil.
Winning a Top Award for a Cake Made with Olive Oil
Months after launching Flour & Olive, Sohne tackled her first trade show. She decided to attend the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York City after winning the Specialty Food Association’s sofi™Award in the Baking Mixes category.
Her company took home the 2024 sofi Gold Award for baking mixes. “It was incredible. It was very much unexpected but also very gratifying,” Sohne exclaims.
Receiving a sofi Gold Award trophy is like winning an Oscar in the specialty food world. It represents the best of the best and current trends in the marketplace. The recognition for Flour & Olive’s almond cake mix introduced Sohne’s products to top food buyers, supermarkets and other retailers and distributors.
Melanie Bartelme, a Specialty Food Association’s Trendspotting Panel member, spotted the cake mixes during the show, which led to more recognition. Her cake mixes also landed on the Specialty Food Association’s Top 2025 Food Trends and Trend Hunter’s list of Top 100 Lifestyle Trends.
“It was an amazing opportunity that opened so many doors to me that would not otherwise have been the case,” says the baking company founder. “I came to appreciate what the Specialty Food Association does in creating equal opportunities for food manufacturers to be able to compete on the merits of their products.”
A Food & Wine article on 2025’s Biggest Food Trend Predictions said her cake mixes “…align well with seeking out the finer things in life.” Some of her customers’ five-star reviews validate the recognition given to Flour & Olive. One buyer wrote, “Made the Californian Almond with Orange-Blossom Glaze, and it was incredible. The cake was tender and moist…” Another customer raved about the cake she made, stating, “This cake mix is absolutely heavenly! It is so moist, flavorful, and so delicious. I love that it has clean ingredients…”
Sohne is thankful for the incredible support she has received during her entrepreneurial journey. She even admits that she enjoys the occasional pushback that comes along with the praise. “I was creating something from nothing, so I expected an upward battle. If somebody has constructive criticism, I perk up. I learn a lot more from that type of criticism than the compliments. It’s what makes me think twice.”
Exploring the World by Baking a Cake with Olive Oil
Flour & Olive engages the minds of home cooks and their families by offering much more than a cake with olive oil and a recipe for a glaze, frosting or other topping. The company’s slogan is “One Cake Mix, A World of Possibilities.”
The cake mix maker shares the importance of encouraging home cooks to explore the larger world of more than 70 international cakes that can be made with her products and extra virgin olive oil.
“I consider these cake mixes a journey, a cake journey. You come into it and decide where you want to go with it. Doing so produces different emotions and a different way of being that I think can be special for people.”
Sohne’s teenage son came up with the idea of making a map of the world an integral part of exploring Flour & Olive’s website. “He loves geography. When I was talking about the website design, he said, ‘You know what would be really cool? If you had this map and could actually see your recipes on it.’ I will forever be grateful to him for that idea,” says his mom.
Home cooks and their children can use the multifaceted, interactive map to find cakes on different continents and then select which country’s cakes they want to make. Their chosen recipes can all be made with Flour & Olive’s flagship almond, vanilla, chocolate and ginger flavors.
“The cake recipes needed to reflect the ingredients and culture of the places they were from, but they also needed to work with my existing cake mixes and with extra virgin olive oil,” notes the CEO. “Part of the consideration with each recipe was whether I could translate the idea from a butter culture or a way of baking into the way I presented the olive oil recipes.”
Sohne calls each cake on the map an experience that transports the bakers to faraway places. The map recipes include options such as Egyptian Whole Orange & Almond, American Pumpkin, Ghanaian Gold Coast Chocolate and Chinese Dragon cakes. Five vegan recipes are available, and all ingredient amounts are given in cups and weight measurements. The website also provides a method for creating personalized messages and labels for cake gifts.
“It truly requires spending some time with the website because there are many more excellent recipes. One of the more popular ones is our Austrian chocolate almond cake. Another almond cake would be our Danish layer cake, which some people have said is the best cake they’ve ever had,” says Sohne. “The French Alsatian apple cake is also very good, as are the Mexican hot chocolate and South African honey cakes.”
Customers tell her how they get creative with Flour & Olive’s cake mixes and international recipes. “The cake mixes are more versatile than I ever imagined. They can be used to make cookies, cake donuts and other baked goods. I actually love that. I’m offering people something to play with and to make a part of them,” Sohne exclaims.
Chocolate Cake with Olive Oil and Other International Flavors
The Columbia University Law School graduate was attending college in the U.S. when she started dabbling with baking. She later improved her skills when she left her career as a practicing attorney to become a full-time mom to her son and twin daughters. Sohne and her French-born husband lived far away from their families, so she found ways to celebrate their cultures through food.
She became known as a baker among her friends. “Since I had no training, I came into it with the understanding that I knew nothing. I was very particular about following a recipe. But then once I followed it, I would try to make it mine,” she states.
The specialty food producer immigrated from Ghana to the U.S. in 1995 and is now a U.S. citizen. Still, her ties to “an international way of thinking” run deep through her grandfather’s work with the United Africa Company and her attendance at international schools.
“My high school anthem was called Understanding of Each Other and started this way, ‘From all the countries of the earth, we come in turn to you, of different nations, different creeds and different aspects too,” recounts Sohne.
Flour & Olive’s owner views olive oil and its history as a unifier with ties that extend beyond the better-known European and Mediterranean producers. Sohne points out that while North Africa has a beautiful Mediterranean tradition, it is also one of the oldest places in the world for olive oil production and consumption. In addition to being one of the first olive producers, Egypt is the birthplace of cakes.
“I want people who might otherwise write themselves out of the story to understand that they have these deep connections. Whether you are from the Caribbean, African American or African, you can bake with olive oil. There is no reason not to see yourself as part of that possibility,” she says.
Flour & Olive’s creator approached choosing her flagship flavors with the hope that her cake mixes and interactive recipe map would connect people to the African diaspora and the less-recognized places where olive oil is produced.
Interestingly, Flour & Olive’s booth at the Fancy Food Show happened to be a few steps away from Flor de la Jara, a Spanish-Jamaican olive oil company that is also one of of Oprah’s 2024 Favorite Things.
Naturally, with California being the #1 olive oil-producing state in the U.S. and the world’s leading producer of almonds, an almond flavor cake mix made sense to Sohne. Her reasons for selecting a chocolate flavor to represent Ghana on the recipe map were its place as the #2 cocoa producer in the world and its history of gold production.
“The Ghanaian Gold Coast Chocolate Cake with Whipped Chocolate Ganache is my way of thanking the country I come from. It’s a tribute to Ghana,” says Sohne.
The company’s Jamaican ginger flavor comes from the baker’s first ginger cake with olive oil, highlighting complex ginger and all-spice flavors. Italian olive oil cakes were her earliest inspiration, so she honored that with the fourth flagship flavor, the Italian vanilla cake mix.
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Expanding One Cake with Olive Oil at a Time
While tinkering in her Kirkland kitchen, the home baker might whip up other flavors for cakes made with extra virgin olive oil. At present, she is putting her energy into building her company’s infrastructure with the assistance of sales, marketing and financial experts. She insists that the slow road to growth is best.
“You can’t build a business on exuberance. I prefer the slow way of doing things. It gives you time to see what is working and what is not working. That way, you can build a company with foundations that are strong enough to stay the course,” says the Kirkland entrepreneur.
Her four cake mix flavors, selling for $18.95 each, contain premium ingredients but no olive oil. Sohne is working on building collaborations and partnerships, including with Flor de la Jara, Kosterina and other companies that make high-quality extra virgin olive oil. McEvoy Ranch and other producers selling her products can help guide home cooks to the best olive oils for Flour & Olive’s cake mixes and international recipes.
“So far, people who experience the cake mixes fall in love with them. It’s how good the cake mixes are and how they are received in the market that is going to dictate how I grow and the kind of legs this business is going to have,” says Sohne.
Flour & Olive’s CEO hopes that as her brand recognition grows, so will people’s understanding of how connected our global village is through the food we eat and the recipes we make. “Our palates are international, and I think what I’m doing is celebrating that and acknowledging that this exists,” she maintains.
Sohne is reminded of her deeply rooted belief in reaching out to others across cultural, culinary and geographical boundaries every time she passes the sofi Gold Award trophy sitting in her home’s entryway. “The most important lesson is understanding each other. Over and over throughout my life, that is the lesson that has been emphasized, that we are all part of one bigger family.”
Explore the world of cake possibilities on Flour & Olive’s recipe map. Order the flagship cake mixes there, on Amazon, or at McEvoy Ranch. Stay up-to-date on Estelle Sohne’s company on social media @flourandolive.co.
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