These days, people understandably what to know where their food comes from. Here in the United States? China? Spain? We go a step further. We can tell you the ranch and the particular grove that supplied the olives used to make the oil inside each of our bottles.
You can see how we do it by looking at the back of a bottle of Olio Nuovo extra virgin olive oil. Below the “harvest” and “best by” dates are some numbers (see photo at right below). They identify a particular batch of oil based on the exact location of the grove of trees.
It’s known as “traceability.” We use a computerized system that tells us the date and time the olives were harvested, the ranch where they were grown, and the block of trees that produced the fruit. A block ranges from 10 to 100 acres.
Grape growers in the wine industry have long used such a computerized system. Lettuce and spinach growers have introduced the technology in response to food safety issues.
California Olive Ranch is the only U.S. EVOO producer using the system.
The technology isn’t cheap. It cost us more than a quarter of a million dollars to install and operate.
Why go to the trouble and expense?
Several reasons:
- We can identify which olives produce great oil and which produce good oil
- We can learn more about the growing conditions and farming practices that produce the best olives, and spread that knowledge among our growers
- If there’s a problem with a particular batch of olives, we can isolate the resulting oil in a particular storage tank so that one bad olive, so to speak, doesn’t spoil the entire bunch
- Knowing which olives produced the oil stored in various tanks allows us to better blend the oil once we bottle it; that way we maintain a consistent quality
- And by coding each of our bottles and boxes, we can keep track of who’s buying our EVOO once it leaves our mill – a particular grocery chain, for example, or a big restaurant operation
Here’s how we do it.
When a truck loaded with freshly harvested olives prepares to leave a ranch and head to one of our mills, a worker scans a bar code accompanying the olives and hands a bar-coded stub to the driver. The stub identifies the date, ranch and block for those particular olives.
At the mill, the driver hands one of our employees the stub as the olives are loaded on the conveyor belt to be cleaned, pressed, and turned into oil. The stub is scanned so we know the time and date the olives entered the mill.
We continue to track the olives via computer as they are: crushed; put in malaxation tanks where the oil is separated from the fruit; spun in a high-speed centrifuge to further separate any fruit particles from the oil; and pumped into storage tanks.
The information about each batch of olives ultimately is coded on every bottle and box of our EVOO.
That way, we know where the oil came from – and you will, too.
Bon appétit,
Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch
