Olive Oil Lesson of the Week #1

Today’s Lesson is an extension of a topic I covered in a recent video I released on social media.

Cold Pressed: What you need to know

I’ve alluded to this many times throughout my 50 day blog but will repeat for the newcomers: there is a strong quantity / quality trade off when making olive oil.

• Squeeze more oil out of the olive —> Quality goes down

• Squeeze less oil out of the olive —> Quality goes Up

Cold Pressed is too often used as a marketing gimmick.

Here is why the term “Cold Pressed” is used on bottles.

• Olives Pressed at WARMER TEMPERATURES extract MORE OIL, with LOWER QUALITY

• Olives Pressed at COLDER TEMPERATURES extract LESS OIL, with HIGHER QUALITY

Cold pressed is another way of saying colder temperature extracted oil.

For some more detail, Extra Virgin is meant to be the Gold Standard of Olive Oil. For this reason, the standard is to press the oil at 27 Degrees Celcius or Below (aka Cold Pressed). Putting my opinion about this specific temperature aside, there is a harsh reality that no one talks about:

Many Producers “legally” press their olives above 27 degrees celsius for their Extra Virgin Olive Oil.

If you’d like to buy truly cold-pressed olive oil, visit palloncino.co. I visited the mill during the harvest (as well as 30+ other mills in 5 different countries) to ensure the quality of the oil was up to a proper standard. You can also go back to previous entries of the blog in 2022 to track my visits across mills in Europe.

Why do Olive Oil producers press above 27 Degrees Celcius?

Consider this. A Farmer named Frank grows olives in Paso Robles, California.

When the olives are ready for harvest in the fall, he brings them to a Miller named Matt, who mills the olives into olive oil. Matt mills for both Frank and the rest of the farmers in Sparta.

Matt makes money by paying Frank for the Olives and then grouping together all the olive oil from Frank and other Farmers in the region. That oil gets sold together to a big brand in California.

Matt has been selling Olive Oil to this bigger California Brand for the past 10 years, and that brand strictly wants his oil to be 0.7 acidity or better

Note: lower acidity is better olive oil. 0.8 is legal threshold for Extra Virgin. Palloncino’s acidity was measured to be 0.17 at the time of bottling.

Matt gets paid in terms of Metric Tons of Olive Oil the brand receives. The California Brand has customers that don’t require a super high quality olive oil.

Matt knows he can produce a 0.2 acidity olive oil given his advanced machinery and proper milling practices, but Matt knows he gets paid in terms of weight of Olive Oil.

Matt is a smart businessman and wants to maintain a decent profit margin to continue operating this mill and perhaps open up new mills across California.

So what does Matt do?

He realizes he can get more oil out of the olive by pressing the oil at a higher temperature. He decides he can crank up the temperature past the 27 degree upper limit and still maintain the extra virgin classification on the olive oil.

Matt knows that there is little regulatory oversight over his small community mill and will continue this practice in perpetuity.

The worst part: that olive oil often is labelled “Cold-Pressed.”

Please note: Millers have many different business models. Some have their own brands, some sell olive oil to bigger brands. It really varies scenario by scenario. If you are an olive oil miller please feel free to share your business model in the new comments section!

As always feel free to reach out with any questions about this article or about olive oil in general.

If you think this article was useful for you, please share with a friend or on social media!

I’ll drop another lesson next week.

-Jack (@extravirginguy)