What Olive Oil Teaches Us About Motherhood
A Conversation with Seasons Founder, Soraya Aguilar
by Hannah Howard
There’s a moment, when you’re talking to Soraya Aguilar, founder of Seasons, when you realize that olive oil—good olive oil—is more than simply an ingredient. It’s a memory system, a set of values, and a way of seeing the world. Before Seasons, before the bottles lined up in tidy rows, before the Fancy Food Shows and booth redesigns and big harvest plans, there was a little girl on a school field trip in Jaén, Spain—the heart of olive oil country—stepping into a factory for the first time.
“The smell was super intense,” she tells me. “Not appealing. It had that kind of cheesy smell of bad olive oil.”
It’s a surprising place to begin a love story, but also an honest one. Because what Soraya understands, deeply, is that quality isn’t a given. It’s something you learn to recognize over time. Something you choose, refine, and return to. And often, it’s something your mother teaches you.
Her real olive oil memories—the ones that stayed—live in her mother’s kitchen. “She cooked all the time,” Soraya says. “Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks. Everything was made by her.” She came from the cadence of a house where food is constant and care is expressed not in grand gestures, but in repetition. Frying eggs in olive oil with garlic in the morning. Bread, olive oil, and a sprinkle of sugar after school. “That was our snack,” she says. “Something so simple. It doesn’t require time, but it tastes delicious.”
This kind of food, this kind of care, isn’t complicated—but it does require presence, attention, and a belief that ingredients matter. In Soraya’s family, that belief was built into daily life. They didn’t buy olive oil at the supermarket; they made it. “We would harvest, take the olives to the mill, and bring home enough for the whole year,” she explains. “It was always super fresh. Made that day.” Later, her father built his own mill to better control quality, but even before that, there was an understanding that olive oil was more than just an ingredient.
When I ask what she learned from the women in her life, she doesn’t hesitate. “Community,” she says. “Support.” Weekends meant everyone together—her mother, aunts, grandmother—gathered in the kitchen, cooking, talking, feeding a crowd. She remembers her grandmother frying chicken skin in olive oil while all the kids waited nearby, anticipating that first bite. It’s easy to picture: the heat of the kitchen, the noise, the closeness, the sense of being held inside a moment.
That world, she tells me, is harder to recreate now. “We’re working. We’re far away from home. We’re not able to do that every weekend.” It’s one of the quieter tensions of modern motherhood—the distance between how we were raised and how we’re raising our own children, the longing for something slower and more communal even as life pulls us in a dozen directions. But Soraya hasn’t lost that foundation; she’s translated it into the life she’s building now, both at home and through Seasons
"In your house, there’s nothing already done,” her kids’ friends tell her, noticing that everything starts with ingredients. It’s not meant as a compliment, but it is one. For Soraya, this is the point: to raise kids who understand food not as something prepackaged and handed to them, but as something they can build. “They’ll get an orange, add some chocolate on top, and they’re ready to go,” she says. “They’re not looking for potato chips.” What she’s passing down isn’t just recipes, but instincts—a comfort with simplicity, a trust in good ingredients, a sense of curiosity about what goes into what we eat. “I would never buy anything if I don’t understand the label,” she adds. “It has to be very simple.”
That same philosophy is embedded in Seasons, and it’s unmistakably maternal, in the deepest sense of care. Soraya describes the business as “a third child,” something her daughters have grown up alongside. They’ve helped in the warehouse during the holidays, stuck labels on products as young as five, spent time in the back of the store finding ways to contribute. “They know they have to pitch in,” she says. “It’s part of the family.” Owning her own business has given her flexibility, but it has also come with tradeoffs. “There were times I missed being with my girls more,” she admits. “It’s another baby.”
And yet, what her daughters see now is something powerful: a mother who is wholeheartedly invested in something she loves. “They have a deep respect for the time I wasn’t there,” she says. “They know I was doing something good for the family.” That understanding has shaped not only how they see her work, but how she leads within it. Many of her employees are women, and she brings that same empathy into the workplace—an understanding that family comes first, that life doesn’t pause for business. “If somebody calls in because their child has a fever, I understand,” she says. “We help each other.”
At one point in our conversation, Soraya reflects on how much the role of women has changed. Her mother’s life was singular in focus: raising children, feeding the family. Now, she says, “we have to juggle a million things—work, kids, support, looking good, being healthy.” The expectations are layered and, at times, overwhelming. “We have so much pressure,” she says, noting how different it feels from the generation before her. It’s not said with bitterness, but with clarity—a recognition of the invisible labor modern motherhood carries, and the ways we are all trying to meet those demands while holding onto ourselves.
And still, she returns to food as a grounding force. These days, that looks like paella on the weekends, when she can gather friends and family together. Everyone contributes—her kids helping with the broth, friends chopping vegetables, the table coming together slowly from many hands. “That feels like home,” she says. It’s not identical to the kitchens she grew up in, but it carries the same spirit: food as connection, as ritual, as a way of saying we’re here, together.
When I ask whether she hopes her daughters will take over the business one day, she’s thoughtful. “I want them to do whatever makes them happy,” she says. But she’s already seeing the influence. One daughter is drawn to branding and marketing; the other, at just fifteen, chose a summer program focused on building food brands. “I was like, why?” she laughs. “But somehow, it’s influencing them.”
Maybe that’s how it works. Not as something imposed, but something absorbed over time. A way of living, of feeding, of caring that takes root quietly and reveals itself later. Like olive oil pressed fresh and poured into a bottle, meant to last the year but carrying with it the imprint of a single harvest, a single place, a single set of hands.
For Soraya, that legacy is already in motion—in her business, in her kitchen, and in the daughters watching it all unfold.