Meet the Producer Behind Turkey's Most-Awarded Extra Virgin Olive Oil

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Once again the pro­duc­ers behind Novavera proved to be among the biggest win­ners at the 2021 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition.

The Turkish com­pany, which spe­cial­izes in pro­duc­ing olive oil from rare local vari­eties, earned a third-con­sec­u­tive Gold Award for its Trilye blend and three Silver Awards for its Ayvalik, Yamalak and organic blends.

According to Bahar Alan, the company’s founder and owner, Novavera is the most-awarded Turkish brand, hav­ing earned more than 200 acco­lades since it was founded in 2018.

“After going through an ill­ness, I real­ized the true impor­tance of health and cre­at­ing a bond with nature,” Alan told Olive Oil Times. ​“Through this, I came to know the true pur­pose of my life: to pro­duce healthy food in the best way and doing it in har­mony with nature.”

Part of this metaphor­i­cal rebirthing of Alan as an olive oil pro­ducer is con­veyed in the name she chose for the com­pany.

“Nova vera means ​‘new spring’ and ​‘new truth’ and can be trans­lated as the ​‘new truth of bahar’ (bahar means spring),” Alan said. ​“Producing olive oil, a healthy food, using the best pos­si­ble approach is the new truth and pur­pose of my life, which I came to know after expe­ri­enc­ing a tough time in my ill­ness. This brand name reminds me of that pur­pose.”

The cor­ner­stone of Novavera was laid when the com­pany planted 2,000 trees over an area of 20 hectares in Ayvalik, which has been the olive cap­i­tal of Turkey for cen­turies.

“At first, it started as a hobby that we wanted to do as a retire­ment project,” Alan said. ​“But being totally drawn to the sub­ject, I was eager to learn every­thing I could find about pro­duc­ing health­ier olive oil with higher amounts of phe­no­lic com­pounds.”

“Now we have more than 160 hectares of groves in the Ayvalik and Manisa regions, which can be described as the old and new olive grow­ing cen­ters of Turkey, respec­tively,” she added.

The first year was chal­leng­ing for Alan and her team, who were not sat­is­fied with the tra­di­tional approaches used in olive farm­ing and har­vest­ing.

“During the first year, our biggest chal­lenge was the con­ven­tional habits of the farm­ers and the har­vesters with whom we worked,” she said. ​“We had to work hard to con­vince them to use more mod­ern ways like the use of crates instead of sacks, or har­vest­ing machines instead of tra­di­tional sticks.”

Erratic weather was another chal­lenge Alan and her team faced as hail, storms, and drought all took their toll on her trees in the first sea­son.

Despite these chal­lenges, Alan said that Novavera’s first year of pro­duc­tion was well-received, with sev­eral oils earn­ing inter­na­tional awards.

“This encour­aged us to learn and invest more time and energy in this new busi­ness line,” Alan said. ​“For this rea­son, we attended two train­ing ses­sions in California for olive oil tast­ing and pro­duc­tion. There, we met experts and got the guid­ance to set up our own mill in the most effi­cient way.”

Early har­vest­ing is pre­ferred for most of the olive vari­eties. The har­vest period usu­ally begins in late September and lasts until the first week of October.

“The post-har­vest olives are imme­di­ately trans­ported to our mills and pressed with­out caus­ing any delay,” Alan said. ​“For the trans­porta­tion of olives from dis­tant loca­tions, vehi­cles with cli­mate-con­trolled stor­age sys­tems are used.”

Once the olives arrive at the mill, they are rinsed using a dou­ble wash sys­tem to remove any residue on the fruit. Afterward, water pass­ing through a spe­cial fil­ter is used to wash the olives one last time. Once the olives have been washed, the cold extrac­tion process begins.

“For olive oil to be con­sid­ered cold extracted, the tem­per­a­ture of the olive paste should not exceed 27 ºC at any stage of pro­duc­tion,” Alan said. ​“Our pro­duc­tion infra­struc­ture and its tech­nol­ogy enable us to mea­sure the tem­per­a­ture of the paste at six points and cools at spe­cific points if needed.”

“Then the olive oil is stored in an air, light and heat resis­tant envi­ron­ment to main­tain its fresh­ness and qual­ity,” she added.

While this process is famil­iar to many extra vir­gin olive oil pro­duc­ers, Alan said that the company’s empha­sis on local vari­eties, includ­ing their Gold Award-win­ning blend, helps Novavera stand out.

“This early har­vest extra vir­gin olive oil blend is pro­duced from Trilye olives, which grow at an alti­tude of 600 meters in the region of Manisa,” Alan said. ​“The oil pro­duced by these olives con­tains high lev­els of polyphe­nols and an intense fruity fla­vor due to their growth on an ideal soil and cli­mate.”

“Every year, we process at least one or two rare local cul­ti­vars and try to pub­li­cize them, such as Yamalak, which we believe is a hid­den jewel,” she added.

Along with their reliance on local vari­eties, Alan also attrib­uted her highly skilled team to the company’s endur­ing suc­cess.

“Our pro­duc­tion team was trained for two years by experts from Italy and the United States,” she said. ​“They can work mir­a­cles in terms of main­tain­ing the level of fruiti­ness and phe­no­lic com­pounds, besides bal­anc­ing the har­mony of oils with the local vari­eties.”

Despite putting stren­u­ous efforts in each phase of pro­duc­tion, Novavera is not immune to the chal­lenges posed by cli­mate change, which are becom­ing increas­ingly preva­lent in Turkey’s Aegean region.

“Last year, we faced the neg­a­tive effects of global warm­ing,” Alan said. ​“Unfortunately, the qual­ity and quan­tity of our crop were affected by drought. But we tried our best to over­come those chal­lenges by apply­ing mod­ern organic agri­cul­ture meth­ods to save our crops.”

According to Alan, cli­mate change is the most sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge faced by farm­ers, not just in Turkey but also in the rest of the world.

“With each pass­ing year, the preva­lence of new dis­eases, untimely rains, droughts and global warm­ing is increas­ing, all of which neg­a­tively impact the qual­ity and quan­tity of crops,” she said.

Alan’s vision and core val­ues are based on the idea of pro­duc­ing healthy food in har­mony with nature. To this end, Novavera has devel­oped a strat­egy to fight cli­mate change.

The com­pany has imple­mented sus­tain­able pro­duc­tion meth­ods with­out gen­er­at­ing any waste, includ­ing sav­ing and recy­cling water.

“We imple­ment organic and bio­dy­namic farm­ing prin­ci­ples in our groves,” Alan said. ​“Our trees are watered by drip irri­ga­tion method only if needed. We ensure through accred­ited tests that no pes­ti­cide residue remains in our olive oils.”

“We pro­duce with­out includ­ing any addi­tional water to the olive paste to avoid the for­ma­tion of water waste,” she added. ​“By send­ing our pomace to recy­cling facil­i­ties, we con­tribute to the trans­for­ma­tion of this prod­uct into fuel.”

Along with envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­ity, Novavera bal­ances the need to remain eco­nom­i­cally viable. As a result, the com­pany cur­rently exports 30 per­cent of its extra vir­gin olive to the United States, Europe and South Korea.

Alan hopes to increase that fig­ure by work­ing with other local pro­duc­ers, but only if they meet her company’s stan­dards.

“We are work­ing on a new busi­ness model to include more farm­ers in our ecosys­tem based on a ​‘con­tracted organic olive farm­ing’ model,” Alan said. ​“To avoid pes­ti­cide-caused cross-con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, we will only process the olives that were grown in our own groves.”

“We would like to enable more farm­ers to grow their olives organ­i­cally,” she added. ​“This model will help olive grow­ers, who lack proper knowl­edge of organic farm­ing, to apply organic farm­ing prin­ci­ples to their groves.”

“Novavera will enable them to apply organic fer­til­iz­ers and harm­less organic pes­ti­cides by fol­low­ing a sched­ule under super­vi­sion,” Alan con­tin­ued. ​“These con­tracted farm­ers will be able to mill their final organic prod­ucts at Novavera. We believe this model will attract the olive grove own­ers who are abroad or liv­ing in cities and can­not take good care of their groves.”