Our Story

Hi, I'm Vladimir. I've always believed home-cooked meals are one of the best things you can give the people you love. So it hit hard when I learned that the tools I was cooking with might be quietly working against that.

It started with some reading I couldn't put down. Worn nonstick coatings, plastic utensils shedding tiny particles with every stir, chemical coatings breaking down under heat. Nothing alarming on any single day — but meal after meal, year after year, it adds up. I decided I wanted something different in my kitchen. Something simple, natural, and honest.

My first thought was metal utensils — at least they're not plastic. But metal scratches pans, and every scratch means more of that coating flaking off into the food. I was solving one problem by creating another.

Then I looked at my cutting board. Plastic, covered in knife marks — thousands of tiny grooves, each one a place where plastic had been shaved off and carried away with the vegetables I'd chopped. Even the "dishwasher-safe" boards I'd trusted for years were quietly ending up in our meals.

So I went looking for a better way. Wood kept coming up — it's gentle on cookware, naturally durable, and it doesn't shed anything harmful into food. But not all wood is equal. Most wooden utensils in stores are cheap softwoods, mass-produced and often treated with finishes that defeat the whole purpose.

That's when I discovered olive wood. Dense, naturally antibacterial, and so hard it can last for decades of daily cooking — no coatings, no treatments, nothing but wood. The trail led me to Tunisia, where olive trees grow for hundreds of years and craftsmen have been working the wood for generations.

In Sfax, Tunisia, I found artisans who do things the way they've always been done. Each piece is shaped by hand from a single block of olive wood — no molds, no assembly lines, no two pieces alike. The grain you see in every spoon and board is the tree's own story, decades or even centuries in the making.

And there's something quietly beautiful about the wood itself: it comes from olive trees that have reached the end of their fruit-bearing life. Instead of being discarded, they're given a second purpose. Nothing wasted, nothing artificial added.

Somewhere along the way, cooking became crowded with gadgets, coatings, and plastic. For me, these pieces bring it back to what it's always been at its core — real food, prepared with simple, honest tools, shared with the people you love.

That's why Willow & Spoon exists. Not just to sell kitchenware, but because I genuinely believe the tools we cook with matter — for our health, and for the health of the people we cook for. Every piece I ship is something I'd put in my own kitchen, and use for my own family.

Here's to cooking well, and living well.

— Vladimir