Our founder, Adolf Viktor Olsson was born on the family's farm outside of Lysekil in Bohuslän, Sweden in October 1897. He was the youngest of 14 children, and the family was deeply involved with all aspects of the local food business including farming, fishing, packing, and so on. Adolf Olsson immigrated to the United States in 1926 and settled in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, Ragnhild. He soon began importing Swedish Foodstuffs from his brothers, and sold them door-to-door. The many native-born Scandinavian immigrants who were then living in New York City were a ready market for the food they remembered from home. Old invoices in our archives from the 1920's and 30's list some of the foods that were popular amongst the immigrants back then such as fiskbullar, aptitbitar, sill, ansjovis and knäckebröd.

Adolf Olsson worked hard during the depression years, and gradually the business grew. Stores began stocking the products he was importing; first in New York, and then in other cities where Scandinavians settled like Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles and Worcester. Wagon jobbers, today known as specialty food distributors, began handling his products. It is a source of great pride for us that A. V. Olsson Trading Co. still does business with some of the accounts that Adolf Olsson started with in the 1930's. Although all these businesses have evolved in many different ways over the past sixty years, as has A. V. Olsson Trading Co., it is significant that our ties to each other have stood the test of time.

A. V. Olsson Trading Co. is a business owned and operated by the Olsson family. Adolf's son, Lennart joined his father in the business in 1954, and then his son, Kenneth, joined his father and grandfather in 1979. In this regard, A. V. Olsson Trading Co. is not a Swedish business per se. However, a significant share of our business is with Swedish products. In fact, 40 percent of our overall turnover comes from goods that we import directly from Sweden. Equally important, our relationships with some of the Swedish firms we represent here in the U.S. go back for many, many years.