Real Good Food

On a trip to Italy in the 1990s, Jim Dixon realized that real extra virgin olive oil tasted much better than the olive oil he’d been using. He couldn’t bring enough of the good stuff home in his suitcase, so he founded Real Good Food and started importing it. These days we offer a lot more than just olive oil, and we use our products at home all the time. The Pacific Northwest is home to a lot of great food, and we love to share the stories of some of our favorite local producers. We’ve got everything from home grown miso and kimchi to chile oils and the mysterious but delicious Boat sauce. Come on down or order online, you will be excited about what you find.

Established in 1999.
Jim started importing olive oil so he’d have plenty for his own kitchen. On a trip to Italy in the 1990s, he realized that real extra virgin olive oil tasted much better than the olive oil he’d been using. He couldn’t bring enough of the good stuff home in his suitcase, so he founded Real Good Food and started importing it. His first shipment was a couple of cases. Jim sold some of the oil to cover the shipping costs. His friends in Portland’s restaurant community wanted more, and Real Good Food slowly became a supplier to chefs. The business is still mostly for wholesale food service. Real Good Food provides the best restaurants in town with more than 100 gallons of extra virgin olive oil every week. Local chefs also buy special vinegars, salt, grains, and other hard-to-find ingredients that Real Good Food sources locally and around the world. Real Good Food always had a loyal following of home cooks who tolerated the erratic dock sale hours so they could get the same products th

Jim D.
Business Owner
I like to eat.
I’m a recovering food writer.
I needed an endless supply of good olive oil for myself.

I grew up eating anything and everything the Northwest offered, from Chinook salmon caught in the Pacific at the mouth of the Umpqua River to pie made from blackberries picked in the cut-over stump land around Roseburg.

I wrote about food and reviewed restaurants for almost 20 years. My very first published article described how to use a propane torch to roast peppers. I’ve written about home cooking, oysters, microbreweries, wild mushrooms, fresh pasta, cheap wine, barbecue, James Beard, sweetbreads, and almost anything else even remotely connected to eating and drinking.

I had my olive oil epiphany in Italy. It was late November, and my wife and I were driving through the outskirts of one of the countless small hill towns that dot western Tuscany when we saw bins of olives outside a nondescript warehouse. We’d found the local olive press, the community frantoio.