“How should I live my life?”

Beatrice Karp posited this question to herself as a freshman studying at the University of Pennsylvania. She was navigating a campus driven by predetermined career paths and default definitions of success. Yet rather than striving for a linear career path, Beatrice turned inward to seek answers to more existential questions:

This search led Beatrice to major in Science, Technology, and Society, a discipline that asks students to examine the human scaffolding behind societal systems. Regardless of whether the context was government, technology, or supply chains, the major’s ethos was illuminating: “Nothing we create is the unapproachable system that we think it is,” Beatrice shares. “Nothing we create is a big black box, government included. All of these entities are just a collection of people and our decisions.”

Beatrice also gravitated towards Buddhist philosophy and existential literature during her time at university. These subjects intersected most powerfully in a campus-renowned course, Existential Despair. Taught by Professor Justin McDaniel, the class met once a week from 5pm to midnight. The seminar had no phones, no breaks. Students stayed in a room for five hours so that they could read a novel cover to cover, uninterrupted. 

The course had no academic objectives. Its sole aim was for students to read and discuss literature with their peers without the distractions of technology or the pressures of academic life. When the course came to an end, this idea of engaging without distraction—simply just existing—lingered in Beatrice’s mind. 

After graduating college in 2022, she embarked on post-grad life with two primary contemplations: Does ultimate truth exist? Is there something that we can say about the world that is true under any conditions? Her personal revelations from Professor McDaniel’s course became core to her identity. “I wanted to see how I could live my life unencumbered by the weight of pre-professionalism,” she explained. “My goal was to be entirely aimless for a year.”

Intentional Aimlessness

The phrase above is an oxymoron in our progress-obsessed society. Existing without striving feels foreign to the American mindset, where productivity is glorified and self-optimization is expected, yet that’s exactly what Beatrice chose. After graduation, Beatrice decided to defer her full-time job in cybersecurity for a year. 

During this gap year, Beatrice’s aimlessness brought her to the olive groves of Tuscany. She spent her days working as an olive picker, connecting with the tangible, living alongside local farmers, and listening to the quiet rhythm of the land.

In the repetition of pruning, harvesting, and pressing, she began to notice a shift. “I don’t know if ultimate truth exists,” she recalls thinking to herself, “but if it does, that tree over there is really close.” There, watching the golden juice extracted from fresh fruit, Beatrice “felt an overwhelming sensation of truth as in a purity, in the form of oil,” she shared. Beatrice had been searching for Truth in the metaphysical realm, and “olive oil [was] a material answer to a spiritual question.” 
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Rethinking Systems

For the second half of her gap year, Beatrice moved to a communal living space in Hawaii where she worked on an experimental homeschooling project led by a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

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Baffled by the bluntness at first, Beatrice quickly began to understand entrepreneurship as a form of problem-solving. “That was what demystified business for me. Not with the sole intention of making money, but to go on adventures and solve problems.” 

While in Tuscany a few months prior, Beatrice had keenly noted the issues facing her fellow small-scale farmers. They had extra oil to sell, yet didn't have the demand nor infrastructure to sell beyond their own villages. A lack of market infrastructure and demand, coupled with increasingly capricious weather patterns, had already left groves abandoned across the region—severing generations-old Tuscan traditions and turning nutrient-rich groves into a wildfire hazard. 

Completing a triad of challenges for small-scale farmers is mass counterfeiting which disincentivizes transparency and integrity in the olive oil industry. “Olive oil is the most counterfeited food in the world,” Beatrice starts. “If you're not there, it's up to the farmer and the farmer needs to make money. Unfortunately in a lot of contexts, if they don’t have enough olives, they’ll get them from somewhere else.”

When Beatrice’s gap year ended she started her full-time cybersecurity job, yet the olive groves and the Tuscan farmers remained on her mind. She began to contemplate what it would look like to approach these systemic challenges with care and to build something that honored the land and the labor behind it. 

After a year of corporate work, Beatrice took a leap of faith. She quit her job and returned to Tuscany. This time, she wasn’t there to only pick olives. She was setting out to build a bridge between American consumers and a network of farmers devoted to preserving agricultural wisdom and integrity.

The Birth of Bea Olive Oil

Bea Olive Oil was born not out of romance, but out of intention. A way to support farmers, restore abandoned groves, and bring the highest-quality, freshest olive oil directly to people who care about how their food is made.

Beatrice is involved in every step of the olive oil process. Each autumn, she returns to Tuscany for the harvest, working side by side with her partner farmers to pick, press, and hand-bottle the oil. The olives are pressed within two hours of harvest, preserving high polyphenol levels that give the oil its signature smoothness and peppery kick. Being part of the physical process and working with her hands delights Beatrice. She finds comfort in knowing the oil pressed from the olives she picked is pure, a simple form of truth.

The oil’s bold flavor certainly reflects the intentionality poured into every step. While most olive oils take months (or even a year) to reach shelves overseas, Bea Olive Oil arrives fresh. Beatrice even drives the U-Haul to pick up the oil shipments from the airport herself. “At every turn, all the opportunities for the oil to be less than perfect have been eliminated because I’m vouching for it at every step” she explains. 

The logo for Bea Olive Oil also came from Beatrice’s admiration for the tactile and physical. She finger-painted the design herself—half green, half purple, representing the ideal ripeness of an olive at harvest. Each bottle is finished with a finger print either pressed by Beatrice or the farmers. Following failed attempts at graphic design, Beatrice mentions that finger-painting was simply an answer to a problem.

In line with her human-centered approach, Beatrice wanted to help other Italian small-scale farmers navigate the FDA approval process to allow them to sell to the US market. The FDA approval process is a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s confusing and expensive, often involving third-party consultants who charge thousands of dollars. “The creators of the FDA process were likely not malicious, but the system isn’t working,” Beatrice states plainly. So she taught herself the system, from its outdated interfaces to its labyrinthine paperwork. Now, she happily open sources her knowledge to help other small producers navigate the intimidating process. Dismantling bureaucratic barriers is a natural extension of the philosophy she learned from her time at university: every system is created by humans, and therefore, capable of being reconceptualized.

Bea Olive Oil is about acting with intention and a continuous choice to care – about the quality of our fruit, the strength of our relationships, and the motivations behind our actions.

Preserving Truth and Tradition 

When reflecting on the most fulfilling part of Bea Olive Oil, Beatrice answers without skipping a beat: “The harvest is the best part. I want to pick olives, and I want to help these people who are my friends solve these problems. I just can't wait to exist over there again.” 

Beatrice speaks with affection for the farmers and communities of the olive groves. Roberto is a farmer in the Florence region and a master pruner who freely shares his knowledge with neighbors. Tuscany, like much of rural Europe, is grappling with modernization. “A lot of young Italians are leaving,” Beatrice shares. “These farmers don’t just grow olives, they keep whole ecosystems of wisdom alive.”

Local communities are searching for ways to sustain their economies without becoming tourist traps; they want to pass on their knowledge to the younger generations before age-old agricultural traditions vanish all together. 

Beatrice doesn’t pretend to know the answers, yet she listens and shows up fully. She does what she can to foster a partnership between Americans interested in high-quality fresh olive oil and a growing network of farmers devoted to preserving tradition.

Beatrice will return to the groves this autumn. To pick and press. To prune and package. To seek truth and solve problems. And to continue contemplating, “How should I live my life?”