It started with my father and a single olive tree.
My father, İsmail Şahin, tasted an olive oil that was bright and alive. He had never tasted anything like it in stores. He decided he didn’t just want to taste that oil again. He wanted to grow it.
In 2017 he found land in Köprübaşı, Manisa, Türkiye. He planted 16,500 young trees across 10 hectares and cared for them like family. That land became Zagoda.
The name “Zagoda” comes from a word used in the Eastern Black Sea region for green olives in brine. Something you share at the table. Something that belongs to you.
From our grove to Ann Arbor
When I moved to Ann Arbor, I couldn’t find real olive oil. The bottles said extra virgin, but the taste said nothing. I missed the oil from our grove in Manisa — the bright green start, and the warmth in the throat.
At first I just brought our oil for people I knew. Friends, then their friends. It wasn’t a business idea. It was simply bringing a piece of home to the table here.
I am Ceren Su Şahin. I am a concert pianist with a DMA from the University of Michigan. My training is to listen for truth and to protect standards. I treat this oil the same way I treat music. I pay attention. I care if it is honest. I will not sell you something I would not serve in my own kitchen.
How we care for the oil
We pick the olives while they are still firm and green. It takes more fruit to make each bottle, but the flavor is brighter and more intense.
We press within hours, not days. The oil is cold extracted under 80 °F and paper filtered. No blending with bulk oil.
Every batch is bottled in dark glass and tested. Our oil stays below 0.3% acidity, far below the legal extra virgin limit.
Rooted in Türkiye. Building in Michigan.
This is our grove, where our oil begins and where my father planted the trees my family still cares for. I live in Ann Arbor now, a first-generation immigrant and a woman running a family business in a new country and a new language, with my name on every bottle.
Zagoda is not a borrowed label or a made-up brand; it is our own oil from our own land, brought here by us, and carried forward by me. When you open the bottle you are tasting that place and that work, and you are tasting a woman who would not accept “good enough”.
