Award-Winning Miller Says Goodbye to Pacific Sun

After a seven-year stint with Pacific Sun Farms, miller Pablo Voitzuk has left the com­pany. His depar­ture comes after another suc­cess­ful award sea­son for one of California’s most acclaimed brands and the deci­sion by the com­pany to wind down their olive oil busi­ness.

Pacific Sun Farms’ olive oils received 17 awards across four dif­fer­ent com­pe­ti­tions this year, includ­ing four Gold Awards and one Silver at the 2018 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition. ​“This recog­ni­tion is an excel­lent note on which to end my asso­ci­a­tion with Pacific Sun Farms. The com­pany has decided to end their olive oil pro­duc­tion,” Voitzuk wrote in a blog post. ​“Pacific Farms is mostly ded­i­cated to farm­ing wal­nuts, prunes and almonds. Olive oil was a sec­ondary enter­prise.”

In spite of all the suc­cess Voitzuk enjoyed at Pacific Sun Farms, the com­pany strug­gled to turn enough of a profit in the enter­prise.

Making money in the olive oil busi­ness is noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult, mainly due to a lack of con­sumer knowl­edge about high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil, which results in many sim­ply select­ing the cheap­est oil on the shelf.

“In these years, the olive oil sec­tion grew a lot, both in quan­tity and qual­ity,” Voitzuk told Olive Oil Times. ​“It became quite dif­fi­cult for the com­pany to keep up with it next to their main activ­i­ties. And most impor­tantly, the econ­omy of it. We’re at a point in which we’d need invest­ment and Pacific Sun Farms has those other pri­or­i­ties.”

During his tenure with Pacific Sun Farms, Voitzuk was instru­men­tal in adopt­ing new olive oil pro­duc­tion processes which he learned dur­ing his time study­ing in Italy. These included using new crush­ing tech­nolo­gies, work­ing with lower tem­per­a­tures, min­i­miz­ing malax­ing times and imme­di­ate fil­tra­tion, among oth­ers.

By closely man­ag­ing these processes, Voitzuk sought to empha­size the impor­tance of achiev­ing high lev­els of phe­no­lic con­tent in the olive oils. He said phe­nols are both ​“crit­i­cal” and ​“essen­tial” to the pro­duc­tion of high-qual­ity olive oil and some­thing that every miller should keep in mind.

“All that has con­tributed to an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion among pro­duc­ers and tast­ing panel mem­bers about these and related sub­jects that I find quite pos­i­tive,” he said. ​“Those prac­tices have proven that you can make good olive oil out of any olive, and that it’s never an olive vari­ety that pro­duces prob­lems in the out­com­ing olive oil. As I always say: the olive is inno­cent, it’s what we do with it.”

Voitzuk is cur­rently milling olives in Greyton, New Zealand, at The Olive Press. This is his sec­ond sea­son in the coun­try, where olive oil pro­duc­tion is in its fledg­ling stages. When he returns to the Northern Hemisphere, he plans on work­ing on sev­eral projects in the Mediterranean with his col­league, Marco Scannu.

Voitzuk said he enjoyed his time work­ing in California, first with Apollo Olive Oil and then Pacific Sun Farms. Olive oil pro­duc­tion is an evolv­ing field, he said, and it is impor­tant to keep learn­ing about the prod­uct while main­tain­ing a ​“non-con­formist atti­tude.”

Voitzuk does not have many regrets about his time work­ing in California, he said, but if he could go back and do it all over again he would empha­size the impor­tance and ben­e­fits of mak­ing olive farms organic.

“If I could go back I’d try to con­vince more olive grow­ers to adopt organic agri­cul­ture,” he said. ​“I advo­cated for it, though I’ll do it way more. I see mul­ti­ple ben­e­fits by mov­ing away from an agri­cul­ture that is based on indus­trial pes­ti­cides. The good news is olives are a crop that is rather eas­ily con­verted into organic. It’s quite doable.”

Voitzuk will teach in the Olive Oil Sommelier Certification pro­gram at the International Culinary Center’s Campbell, California cam­pus this September and said he would like to judge again at the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition next year. He also believes that the bonds cre­ated through the cama­raderie of olive oil will keep him in touch with his friends and col­leagues from the West Coast.

“Love for olive oil cre­ates a par­tic­u­lar bond, which makes me think that we’ll stay con­nected, one way or another,” he said.