The Good Oil
Afternoon sun warming olive groves, a two-storey Mediterranean-style building with terracotta roofing and lime-washed walls. Inside, oil-processing plant, a laboratory, offices, a retail shop and cafe, and a warm welcome from a South African mechanical engineer. This isn't Tuscany but Kerikeri, where Lorraine Brown went to check out an entrepreneurial Kiwi firm that has dared to take on Europe at its own game.
(click to enlarge)
Olivado New Zealand was launched in 2000 to signal a change in focus for the business established in 1998 as Olives New Zealand, an olive oil venture.
Company founder and Chief Executive Chris Nathan planted 3000 trees, which will become productive in the next year or so.
With its high sunshine hours and Mediterranean-type climate, Kerikeri in the Bay of Islands was a natural location. The 30-acre grove includes a number of varieties of olive trees, including Kalamata, which produce a large and very nutritious olive, and a miniature variety known as Clone 2264RW, which is exclusive to Olivado. It produces olives of a very appealing size and taste.
Mr Nathan wanted to use a modern continuous-process plant to extract high-quality olive oil, but the expensive European machinery would be idle for 11 months of the year. In the face of enormous established competition in the saturated olive oil market, the sums just didn't add up.
So he set about diversifying, setting his sights on extracting food-quality avocado oil using the press he had bought for processing the fruit of the yet-to-mature olive trees (about five years from planting to production).
The avocado and olive seasons are complementary, which, combined with the sheer volume of avocado production, meant year-round utilisation of the plant would be possible.
The venture faced little competition – extra virgin avocado oil for culinary use is pretty much unique to New Zealand. Much lower-quality avocado oil is produced in Mexico for example, but it is routinely derived from chemical rendering of rotten and very low grade fruit and used in cosmetics manufacture and for producing guacamole.
This case study is reproduced with permission from e.nz magazine. Subscriptions to e.nz are discounted for schools and TENZ members.
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