Katina Mountanos: Founder and CEO of Kosterina

Episode 865

On today’s episode, we welcome Katina Mountanos, Founder and CEO of Kosterina — a modern Mediterranean wellness brand built around high-antioxidant, early-harvest extra virgin olive oil.
Kosterina is what happens when someone is searching for something better, so they decide to create it. Katina grew up with olive oil as part of everyday life, but later realized that much of what was sold in the U.S. lacked the quality, freshness, and health benefits consumers expected. That discovery became her why: to make truly great olive oil more accessible and help people live longer, healthier, and more delicious lives.
In this episode, Katina shares what most consumers still don’t understand about olive oil, why she built Kosterina as a wellness brand, how she scaled into retailers like Whole Foods and Target, and what it takes to turn a timeless ingredient into a modern lifestyle company.
So, so good! Listen now.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control, control, control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go, let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. What happens when something you grew up believing was good for you turns out to be surprisingly hard to find in its best form? So very excited today to have our next guest, Katina Mountanos, founder and CEO of Kosterina, is here with us today. She grew up with olive oil, like many of us, but kind of in a different way in her everyday life. And years later realized that much of the olive oil being sold in the US wasn’t what consumers thought they were buying, and frankly was a little butchered. You can tell in the taste and the quality was also super inconsistent, freshness wasn’t always there, so like any great entrepreneur, she decided I’m going to figure out how to actually bottle this, what I know is good, or figure out how to find what I want in an olive oil and make it happen, so in 2020 she did just that. Launched Coast Arena, a modern Mediterranean wellness brand built around this incredible high antioxidant early harvest extra virgin olive oil sourced from southern Greece, and I have to tell you, we are huge fans around my house, so I’m super, super excited to have her here to talk more about the backstory, as well as the brand, and everything around this. So, Katina, thank you so much. So nice to meet you.

Katina Mountanos 2:15
Thank you, Kara. Thanks so much for having me.

Kara Goldin 2:18
So, for those who aren’t familiar with Kosterina yet? What is the company, and what problem were you trying to solve when you started

Katina Mountanos 2:27
it? Yeah, so Kosterina really is a wellness platform centered around this very high antioxidant, extremely delicious extra virgin olive oil, but more broadly the Mediterranean diet and lifestyle, and so I came to building Kosterina first from a place of taste, so like you said, my family comes from southern Greece, and I grew up between New York and this very small town in southern Greece that’s basically in the center of olive country, and olive oil was in every meal, my grandfather was a fisherman, and he would, you know, bring home fresh fish every day, my grandmother would prepare it with just olive oil and lemon, that’s it. And so I grew up just knowing what good olive oil tasted like. And as an adult, when I started cooking more at home, I realized that the olive oil I was buying in the supermarket in New York City tasted nothing like what my family made, and I didn’t understand why. So first started exploring from a place of taste, and that brought me to taking an olive oil sommelier course. So, as part of that certification, not only did I learn like what good olive oil tastes like, but that’s where I was sort of blown away by just how powerful and healthy olive oil can be when it’s harvested early and milled and transported in certain ways, and it all ties back to a very magical compound in extra virgin olive oil called polyphenols. Those are antioxidants, and I’m happy to share more about those, but they’re so, so powerful and essentially fight inflammation in the body anywhere it’s brewing. How long did this actually take you before launching in 2020 to actually

Kara Goldin 4:00
figure out how to launch the brand Coast Arena.

Katina Mountanos 4:03
It took probably about two and a half years. So I first took that olive oil sommelier course in 2017 I believe, and then really started looking to source this type of quality of extra virgin olive oil. So I was looking for a very specific variety, it’s called Coronaiki, and the reason for that is a few fold, my family, where I grew up, is Coroni. The town is named Coroni, and Coronaiki is the variety of extra virgin olive oil that grows throughout all of Greece. Coronaiki just means from Coroni, so that seed and tree originate in my hometown, and I wanted it to be that variety because it was so native to where I come from, but it also tastes amazing. It has a more mild flavor, it doesn’t overpower whatever you’re putting it on, and it also is naturally high in polyphenol or antioxidant content, so a sort of that trifecta. And I paired up with a partner of mine who is, who’s still with the company today, named Eli. Us, he’s based in Athens, and he helped introduce me to some of the best producers all around southern Greece, and those producers that met our parameters, we would continue to meet with and see if we could source their olive oil, and we now work with all the best producers all over Greece. How did you come up with the name Kosterina? My full name is Katerina, or Katarina in English, and my husband’s name is Costas. It’s kind of a silly story, but our wedding hashtag, when we got married, remember how everyone was doing, like Brangelina back in the day. We used the wedding hashtag Kosterina, and so after our wedding, people started naturally jokingly calling us Kosterina together, and when I wanted to start the company. I wanted it to sound Greek. I wanted it to stand for family and love and health, and I already owned the URL, so it was a natural process to naming the brand after that.

Kara Goldin 5:52
I love it. So, before launching Coast Arena, you held leadership roles at both large and small companies, Amazon, Walmart, L’Oreal, plus startups that were in different spaces. So, what made you decide it was finally time to go out and hang your own shingle and be an entrepreneur?

Katina Mountanos 6:14
My career started in investment banking, and then after getting my MBA, I worked at L’Oréal, so most of my experience was in big companies, and then I had this sort of mind-blowing experience at my first startup run by a very iconic New York City founder named Mark Laurie. He founded a company called Quiddsey, which was sold to Amazon, and then Jet, which was ultimately sold to Walmart. I’ve worked for all four of those companies, and in that experience I learned just how amazing it is to be an entrepreneur. It’s like an addiction that you can’t kick after you get a little taste of it sometimes, and it was just like so much autonomy, so much learning, it was so exciting. I really realized that I love building, and yeah, that’s what really brought me to launching Kosterina. When I had just the personal interest, building this company has pulled together like so many different pieces of my career, and so many different pieces of my personal life. So, I had worked in e-commerce, I had worked in big retail, I had worked in product development, in terms of industry, and then from a personal standpoint, like, I love Greece, and everything that it stands for, and it’s like my greatest joy to be able to bring some aspects of Greece to the US, and I’m also like obsessed with health and wellness and food, so it really just melds everything that I love in one.

Kara Goldin 7:27
So, what shocked you most as you when you were digging into the industry, how olive oil is sourced and produced and sold?

Katina Mountanos 7:36
I think what shocked me the most was learning one that a very small portion of Greek olive oil is sold in the US as Greek olive oil. Most Greeks actually sell their olive oil to Italy, and the second thing that I learned was that you can source remnant olive oils from all over the world, bottle it in Italy, and call it Italian extra virgin, and it was, you know, Italian extra virgin and Greek extra virgin that I was buying in the supermarket in New York City, and it tasted nothing like what my family made on this very small family farm, and I just didn’t even understand how it could say Greek extra virgin olive oil on the bottle, and so you know it really does affect taste and quality when you don’t actually produce and store it and transport it the right way,

Kara Goldin 8:21
so extra virgin olive oil, big misconception. I read you talk about this a bit, but what do you think most consumers believe it is versus what it actually is often?

Katina Mountanos 8:35
So extra virgin olive oil just means that it’s the first squeeze of the olive, and the truth is, all olive oil is healthy. It’s a healthy mono unsaturated fat. It’s just that when you sort of do the right things and think about quality in the production and sourcing and transportation process, you can get

Katina Mountanos 8:53
so much

Katina Mountanos 8:53
more out of your olive oil, both from a flavor standpoint and a health standpoint. And so, when you harvest a little bit earlier, you really maximize that polyphenol content, which can truly influence whole body health. Like these polyphenols have been proven to reduce the risk of cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease. It fights inflammation, and though inflammation is ultimately at a very high level the cause of a lot of those chronic diseases, and so you could be getting so much more out of your olive oil than then maybe you are buying, you know, a cheap bottle that’s under $10

Kara Goldin 9:29
and so, so interesting. So, you built Kosterina as a wellness brand, not just as an olive oil brand or a food brand. Why was that important from day one?

Katina Mountanos 9:41
I think that’s what was most exciting for me, so you know, I grew up on the Mediterranean diet, that’s what we ate at home, that’s what we ate when we were in Greece, and I was, you know, reading and seeing that the Mediterranean diet was voted the best diet for overall health year after year after year in places like US News and World Report, it’s essentially undisputed as like. A very healthy way to live, and in looking at it, I was like, this is actually a very easy way to cook at home, because I think a lot of, like, the biggest win for someone in their everyday life for their health is simply to just cook at home more and eat at home, like, less takeout, you know, in restaurants you’re getting seed oils, you’re not getting organic, you know, meats and proteins and chicken, you’re not getting organic produce, and so avoiding, like, seeing the conscious consumer trying to avoid seed oils and microplastics and glyphosate, eating at home and using your own ingredients is one of the easiest ways to do that, and so it was always around the Mediterranean diet, and this way of living, it wasn’t just put extra virgin olive oil on everything. It was like, you know, eat plant forward, think about the clean protein and what you’re putting in your diet, but also like think about your lifestyle, eat with your family and friends, whatever family means to you, and that aspect of, like, Greeks like to dance on tables, you know, they like to drink a little wine, it’s enjoying life and sort of pulling that all together in a brand,

Kara Goldin 11:02
how many SKUs did you actually launch with?

Katina Mountanos 11:05
One, just our original one. Yeah, our original extra virgin olive oil, the white bottle,

Kara Goldin 11:11
that’s amazing. And can you talk about how that’s changed today in 2026

Katina Mountanos 11:16
Yeah, it actually hasn’t changed. It’s still our original extra virgin olive oil. It’s still always over 500 milligrams per kilogram of polyphenol content. Still tastes amazing. It’s still award-winning, and it’s our best seller by far. You know, it’s definitely our biggest, our best-selling product, followed by our second signature olive oil, the blue bottle, which we call the everyday. And so, the white bottle we recommend for dipping and drizzling and the blue for cooking and baking,

Kara Goldin 11:43
it’s so, so, so good. It’s so interesting what you said about olives, and, and that the better olives are the ones at the beginning of the growth cycle, versus like a grape, right? That’s totally different. So, it’s, it’s really fascinating,

Katina Mountanos 12:00
and just to like double click on that a little bit, so what happens is when you wait until an olive is very ripe, you get a lot of juice out of that olive. So traditionally, most producers waited for that because they would sell their product by the pound or by the kilo, and people didn’t understand the quality difference. When you harvest it early, not too much juice comes out, but the juice that comes out is so potent, so delicious, and so high in antioxidant content, but that’s why good olive oil is more expensive, because there’s literally less juice from the squeeze.

Kara Goldin 12:28
There’s a ton of education around the category, because it is so competitive, even though yours is a better quality product. But what do you think, consumers? I feel like you’ve got two audiences, you’ve got the grocery buyers, especially if you’re not just a D to C company, and then you’ve got the consumers. Like, how do you set yourself apart so that somebody actually purchases the product or puts it on the shelf? In the case of retail,

Katina Mountanos 12:59
yeah, we really kind of like to put blinders on as it relates to the industry, and just stay really core to our mission, which truly is to influence consumer health outcomes. We want to make people healthier, and we want them to enjoy their food and their life more, and so, you know, we will always make the right choice as it relates to health, more so than, you know, business economics, and that’s really our gold standard and our north star, and what we’re constantly aiming for. So, we’re always looking to be the cleanest olive oil on the market, the highest in polyphenol content, and still maintaining that incredible taste.

Kara Goldin 13:35
I always tell new entrepreneurs that it’s hard right at every stage of growth, but it’s exciting to create a product, and then it’s exciting when you get it on the shelf at a major retailer that you’ve been trying to do for so long, but looking about what was one of the hardest parts of building the business, especially during the first few years,

Katina Mountanos 13:59
so the I would say the hardest part during the first few years was the supply chain management through Covid, because we launched in January 2020 and then, of course, the world shut down in March. We had so much trouble sourcing glass, like we were too small to really have any pull with suppliers who were being pulled in so many different directions. So I remember, like, a point in time where we were literally calling, like, every factory in the world to see if they could make our glass bottle, because we literally just had none. So, I think that period was definitely the toughest, just from an operational standpoint. But, of course, there have been challenging moments, like we, we launched in Whole Foods with our one first SKU in August of 2020 and before COVID happened, our entire marketing plan was to sample the product. We were like, oh, once people taste this, they’re going to love it so much, and they were going to become loyal customers. Guess what? We couldn’t sample in a single store for over a year after launch, so yeah, there were some challenges early on because of the timing of our launch as well. So a lot of founders talk about building. Community, but Kosterina seems to have created real daily habits around the brand. How can you share a little bit more about that for people that haven’t actually been to your site or enjoyed the brand? Sure, yeah, we do a lot of content creation just around health and wellness. We want to educate and inspire people to live healthier to adopt the Mediterranean diet, and so one, we develop a lot of recipes that leverage our products, and in Mediterranean-inspired recipes to give people inspiration and ideas for, you know, what to make this weekend, what to make this week, and a lot of our content in our weekly wellness newsletter is all around broader health, so not just nutrition, although that’s a major topic, but also fitness, sleep, meditation, mindfulness, and lifestyle more broadly. And so you know that’s really how we build community. We try to find people who are interested in these topics and want to learn and want to be inspired by, you know, the type of content that we put out. And so our major platforms really are our email list, Instagram, TikTok, of course, you know the broader meta as well.

Kara Goldin 16:07
So you’ve expanded a little bit beyond olive oil, can you talk a little bit about that?

Katina Mountanos 16:14
Yes, just a little bit. I feel like we do have a pretty broad range of products now, and it’s been really exciting, so we sit across four major categories today. Of course, our olive oil, and I should mention every product in the Kosterina lineup has an underlying health reason for being. So, in the case of the all extra virgin olive oils, it’s those polyphenols that we’ve been talking about, and you know, we’ve got our everyday olive oil, we’ve got our white bottle olive oil, and more recently we just launched our extra virgin olive oil shots, and so this little guy is an ultra high phenolic extra virgin olive oil. So our blue bottle is always over 350 milligrams per kilogram, as measured at the time of harvest. Our white bottle is always over 500 and this is always over 1000 so this is our most potent olive oil, and it’s essentially like food as medicine, because we recommend taking it, you know, either first thing in the morning or at any point of the day for antioxidant benefits, and so this sort of sits in more as a supplement, and you get a slight burn at the back of your throat when you take high polyphenol content olive oil, that’s how you know it’s working, that’s how you know those polyphenols are there.

Kara Goldin 17:24
So, interesting.

Katina Mountanos 17:25
Yeah, it’s really fascinating. And the olive oil shot has gone, has really exploded on TikTok. It’s become a viral trend. So, Kourtney Kardashian was first to talk about doing it every day, and more recently, Hailey Bieber was just interviewed by Time magazine, and said it was one of her non-negotiables every single morning to take a shot of olive oil and lemon, and that’s really putting it into the zeitgeist. It’s going viral on TikTok, so we’re just really excited to have, like, just the chops behind us and the product quality behind us to, you know, be there at this moment where people are really looking for this.

Kara Goldin 17:59
So I’m so curious, like I haven’t done it, obviously, but the olive oil shot, like, is it, is the experience kind of like you have to get used to it a little bit, because oil, I don’t know, like even though you dip with it, it might, I don’t know, it’s different, it is

Katina Mountanos 18:17
different, it is different, I’m excited for to try, for to send it to you, so you can try, but it is a little bit of a different experience. Like, I love the taste of olive oil. Obviously, I actually put this on my gluten-free toast every morning, but most people just take a shot of it or put it in their smoothie, and you get, you do get a little bit of pepperiness. So it’s similar to, have you ever taken, like, a ginger and turmeric shot? Yeah, you know how that can be, like, a little harsh. This is not like that. This is less, you know, peppery, or you know, or harsh than that. And so you had asked about our other categories as well, that I want to make sure I mentioned, which are our vinegars and our olives. And so we make two different types of vinegars. We make dark balsamic vinegars, which are your traditional balsamics, and a few different flavors, like fig, walnut, and dark chocolate, and those balsamics are just very high quality and thick. They use a high percentage of grape must, and so you get like a really thick, high-quality, delicious balsamic. And fermented foods are great for the gut microbiome, and that’s our reason for being. And then we make four different fruit vinegars, which are actually drinkable. Have you ever taken apple cider vinegar for health purposes? I have. I have. Yeah, yeah. So, you may know the health benefits of ACV are blood sugar stabilization. You’ll get a smaller spike after, like, eating a carb-heavy meal if you drink vinegar before, during, or after that meal. And so, you know, I couldn’t stomach the taste of ACV, and wanted to create something that tasted much, much better. So we worked with one of our producers and developed our crushed strawberry, tangerine, and blueberry, and now cucumber lemon vinegars that do just that, and they’re delicious in, of course, salad dressings, but also cocktails and mocktails at all whole. Foods, but they’re they just launched nationally at Walmart, so that’s been our biggest, you know, scale launch to date on the vinegar side.

Kara Goldin 20:07
As you head into retailers like Whole Foods and Target, what, and Walmart, what changes when you go from selling directly to consumers to competing in that crowded retail shelf space, that even though it might be a big space in certain stores, it’s still limited.

Katina Mountanos 20:26
Yeah, I think it’s our biggest challenge has been maintaining what our design, because we’re just obsessed with the esthetic of how this looks. We want it to evoke Greece, we want to evoke the Mediterranean, and this like minimalist approach on on our olive oils, vinegars, and olives, and so at Shelf, a lot of brands do scream with all the different logos and all the certifications they’ve got, and so it’s a matter of it’s a balance in educating the consumer on everything that this product is, but still maintaining that beauty at Shelf. As a founder, you know, it’s

Kara Goldin 21:00
always a little different than maybe what you thought it would be, and I love getting phone calls and emails back from people who were on my team who years later decided to launch their own, and they’re like, I had no idea, I am either so sorry or how did I not really realize this, because there are aspects that you know when you’re leading a company to you, you’re not going to sit here and tell the team every single detail, you want to keep them going and motivated, but then there is hard stuff that goes on, so what’s something that founders you believe consistently underestimate about scaling a consumer products company that maybe you learned from your own experience.

Katina Mountanos 21:46
Oh my gosh, cash management for sure. No one told me that if you have a little bit of success and growth, you’re never going to have any cash, and that’s because you’re constantly reinvesting it into building inventory for your next launch, or your next big thing or your next category, and so just being able to maintain healthy, sustainable growth and manage cash to ensure you know that growth can be there in the future has been the hardest part, mostly because of building inventory, and you know we have debt partners and there’s a lot of options out there, but it’s still always been the most difficult part of the job.

Kara Goldin 22:24
So, you had come from the private equity investment banking, I guess, world prior to launching, or prior to going to business school, and then prior to launching your brand. What did you learn from that experience that you think is really valuable outside of knowing how to build a business plan, I mean, what, what aspect do you think is really important?

Katina Mountanos 22:46
It was an amazing foundation. I mean, I was just in Excel, looking at financial models, and I had a deep understanding of accounting, which I think you don’t realize how important it is in launching a business, and understanding, like, how does the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement all work together like there are some boring but essential elements of how you know those three financial statements interact that are critical for managing for cash management and for managing the business ongoing, knowing that you know the balance sheet is a point in time that the income statement is, you know, for certain periods of time, and then how that works with the cash flow statement. So, I think the deep understanding of accounting from building financial models was one of the most important things I learned in investment banking.

Kara Goldin 23:31
Yeah, definitely. And when you are growing a company, which you know we all hope to be able to do, when you’re actually above plan, you know, you’re celebrating, but it’s also kind of messes up the rest a little bit. You have to make adjustments along the way, and I think that that can be really, really tricky. I would say velocity is, is, you know, key. It’s not just about getting on the shelf, but also pulling off the shelf, and, and things like that early on, that I think were, were really, really key to hint success, in particular. But if you could change one thing about how Americans are thinking about food and health, what would it be today? What is, like, frustrating? I mean, I guess there’s still this education six years later that you know so much about what do you wish you could change about Americans’ perception about the industry.

Katina Mountanos 24:30
I think that we’ve normalized some things that are really affecting consumer health, you know, over the years, and like basic things, like I feel like no one should really be eating from, like, that coffee shop dealt, you know, bakery case. No one should be. We shouldn’t be feeding our children goldfish or Doritos, and you know, traditional Gatorade. It’s like things that are generally recognized as okay that we are using and. Eating and consuming on a recurring basis, that really just we need to eliminate, and I think personally I’ve learned just how different I feel when I can eliminate some of these, you know, ultra-processed foods or things that I know can adversely affect my health over time that I’ve now don’t want them anymore, and so I just wish that we could be a little bit more clear about, you know, what people are consuming and and understanding normalizing things like the deli sandwich, or you know, just some of those foods that I mentioned that everyone thinks is okay, or like, you know, Dunkin Donuts drinks with so much sugar that we really need to educate people about.

Kara Goldin 25:36
I love that. So, Coast Arena, you, you launch with one one SKU, you built it into a bunch of different categories. If you could tell people to purchase one item to try it, what are you most proud of that is whether it’s, you know, the number one seller or what is what is something that you produce that is just so awesome and so unique.

Katina Mountanos 26:04
All right, you’re making me choose a favorite child. It’s really hard. I think I would say it’s a little bit of a cheat, but I would say the extra virgin duo, which is our white bottle and blue bottle olive oils, because you know the white bottle lives on your table, dipping, drizzling, salad dressings, etc. and the blue lives right next to your stove, and you know you’re cooking your eggs with it in the morning, you’re sauteing with it, and you’re using it on roasted vegetables and proteins, so I think you know those extra virgin olive oils have been voted some of the best olive oils in the world in 2026 and even before that, and so just integrating those into your, you know, daily routine is a huge upgrade.

Kara Goldin 26:40
I love it. Well, Katina, thank you so much. This was so terrific and educational and inspiring, for sure. You took something everyone thought they understood, olive oil, and have shown us what most people can’t actually or haven’t really thought about, I guess, and created a product that is so, so yummy for everyone listening. Check out Kosterina, and we’ll have all the info in the show not show notes, but also follow Katina to learn more about everything they’re doing at Kosterina, and all of the great content that they’re putting out too. So, thank you again, Katina, and thank you everyone for listening. I’ll see you next time on The Kara Goldin Show.

Katina Mountanos 27:23
You, Kara, I appreciate it.

Kara Goldin 27:25
Thanks again for listening to The Kara Goldin Show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit, and of course, feel free to subscribe, so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint. We are here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Thanks for listening. And goodbye for now.

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