Olive Oil Production

Written by Rusty Eddy Wednesday, 11 November 2009 08:38

News

On California's Central Coast, olives and grapes co-exist very nicely, thank you very much.  Not only are they complementary crops, but they're both part of a healthy lifestyle.  Olive oil is a wonderful substitute for saturated fats, and it tastes great, especially when it's made with the care and attention that many small growers practice.

Paso Robles even has an olive festival every August, with olive oil sampling, a cooking contest, and plenty of local wines.  WeOlive, just off the Paso Robles town square, sells LOTS of different oils from producers all over the state.

The market for artisan olive oil has boomed in California.  California olive growers pressed 675,000 gallons of oil from 21,000 acres in 2008.  Plantings are expected to grow by 10,000 acres annually through 2020, according to the California Olive Oil Council.  American consumers currently enjoy an average of 750 milliliters (same as a standard bottle of wine) of olive oil per year, compared with 24 liters in Greece and 14 liters in Spain and Italy.   Currently, 99 percent of the olive oil consumed in the U.S. is imported. 

Before you can sell olive oil, of course, you have to make it.  Growers pick their crops and transport their olives to olive mills or presses located throughout the State.  But now there's a new company that's taking the mill to the growers.

Olive to Bottle (O2B) was founded recently by Prospero Equipment Corporation.  It's run by entrepreneur Mark Robinson out of Davis, California, coincidentally where the University of California, Davis started an Olive Center a few years ago.

O2B has the first mobile olive mill to be established in the United States and they're Certified Organic by the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF).

“The timing is right for the burgeoning California Olive Industry,” said operator Robinson. AWS/Prospero is a major supplier of wine, beer and olive processing equipment.   Along with his brother Andy, Mark Robinson installed Prospero equipment in a custom-designed trailer that travels directly to olive orchards.

Click here to see the mill in action on YouTube.

According to the U.C. Davis Olive Center, the amount of time between harvest and milling is a key component to good olive oil.  Robinson says that’s the mobile mill’s key advantage:  “we can travel directly to the olive growers, and whether they hand harvest or mechanically harvest, we can have their olives processed within hours, reducing costs, providing a fresher product, and streamlining efficiency. 

O2B’s mill processes one ton of olives per hour, and the mill’s size was chosen to allow mobility. O2B  focuses on small to medium producers, with emphasis on the highest quality and standards available.

This is great news for California's small olive growers.  It means there might even be a step up in quality for their premium products.  As big a paradigm shift as refrigeration was to the wine industry?  Maybe not, but it certainly gives small growers a point of difference compared to the big competition.

 

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