Australian Co. Debuts New Table Olive Production Method

Summary

A new pro­cess­ing method in Australia is being devel­oped to broaden the table olive mar­ket, pro­duc­ing olives that are crispy, fresh, and packed with polyphe­nols in a frac­tion of the time taken by tra­di­tional meth­ods. This inno­v­a­tive approach, which avoids fer­men­ta­tion and main­tains the olives in brine from har­vest to pack­ag­ing, aims to pro­vide con­sumers with a new type of table olive that is fruity, not bit­ter, and appeal­ing to those who have not yet devel­oped a taste for tra­di­tional olives.

In Australia, a new pro­cess­ing method is draw­ing atten­tion for its poten­tial to broaden the table olive mar­ket.

Crispy, packed with olive oil, fresh fla­vors, and polyphe­nols, and processed in a frac­tion of the time taken by tra­di­tional meth­ods, one researcher pro­duced 86 met­ric tons of table olives using a novel tech­nique.

The goal for the com­pany, Olives the Australian Way, is to reach at least 300 tons next sea­son, as a new pro­cess­ing and demon­stra­tion facil­ity nears com­ple­tion.

“We do not yet export them, but we were asked to send them to America and South Africa,” John Fielke, inven­tor of the new method and indus­try pro­fes­sor of mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing at the University of South Australia, told Olive Oil Times. ​“Where I go, I bring them with me. They have been tasted in sev­eral coun­tries.”

Compared to tra­di­tional table olive pro­duc­tion meth­ods, the new approach has sev­eral advan­tages, both in the har­vest­ing and pro­cess­ing phases.

Harvesting is a crit­i­cal stage for table olives, as machines reduce har­vest­ing times and costs com­pared to hand-pick­ing. But mechan­i­cal har­vests also increase the like­li­hood of dam­ag­ing the olives.

External bruis­ing and abra­sions lead to dis­col­oration and oxi­da­tion of phe­no­lic com­pounds, which in turn degrade fruit qual­ity and appear­ance, reduc­ing out­put and prof­itabil­ity.

According to the com­pany, the nor­mal drop­ping and hit­ting of olives dur­ing mechan­i­cal har­vest­ing is no longer a prob­lem.

“We know that olives often get a lit­tle bit bruised and bat­tered with the mechan­i­cal har­vest­ing, but we put them imme­di­ately into our acidic brine,” Fielke said. ​“This stops that enzymic action, the bruis­ing fades and the olive becomes a uni­form straw color.” 

“We see that more than 90 per­cent of the olives com­ing from mechan­i­cal har­vest can still be han­dled as a fin­ished, per­fect prod­uct,” he added.

Another unique fea­ture of the new method is the lack of fer­men­ta­tion dur­ing pro­cess­ing.

Fermentation in tra­di­tional table olive pro­cess­ing is cru­cial for remov­ing bit­ter­ness, pri­mar­ily caused by phe­no­lic com­pounds such as oleu­ropein, and for pre­serv­ing the fruit. 

In brine, native or added microbes break down phe­no­lic com­pounds, pro­duc­ing lac­tic acid and low­er­ing the pH, which pre­serves the olives.

While the process can improve fla­vor and tex­ture, the draw­backs include long fer­men­ta­tion times, vari­able qual­ity and risks of spoilage or unap­peal­ing fla­vors unless care­fully con­trolled.

“We are not get­ting any fer­men­ta­tion. We avoid fer­men­ta­tion of our olives, as it would lead to decom­po­si­tion of the olives,” Fielke said.

The method requires the olives to be placed directly into brine at har­vest and main­tain­ing that same brine through­out the process, rather than replac­ing it.

“We keep that brine. We have no mold, no fun­gal growth in our brines from start to fin­ish. We have a lot of tech­nol­ogy for that, we have our tanks open to the air, and we don’t have any yeast or mold growth on the top of our tanks,” Fielke said.

Filtration removes bit­ter com­pounds from the brine, rather than rely­ing on fer­men­ta­tion to reduce bit­ter­ness. 

Fielke cred­its this novel approach with pre­serv­ing the olive’s nat­ural olive oil con­tent while pro­duc­ing fresh, fruity fla­vor pro­files.

“We keep our brine crys­tal clear just like a swim­ming pool. So all the way from when they arrive to when they’re packed out. Our fin­ished olives go out in vir­tu­ally a clear brine,” he said.

According to Fielke, the lack of fer­men­ta­tion helps to keep the crisp­ness of the olives. ​“Not firm and solid, but crisp. We can really keep nice tex­tures in there,” he said.

In a small round of tast­ings orga­nized in Rome by Olive Oil Times, those claims were con­firmed for pack­ages of three dif­fer­ent cul­ti­vars: Hojiblanca, Picual and Leccino.

“My first reac­tion was sur­prise. I never tasted a crispy table olive or one that seems to have just come off the tree with no sign of bit­ter­ness before,” Graziano Giovani, a table olive expert in the Argentario Promontory, told Olive Oil Times.

According to local leg­ends, the name Argentario (mean­ing ​“sil­ver” in Italian) orig­i­nates from the dis­tinc­tive sil­very-green color of the olive tree leaves that are abun­dant on the penin­sula. Table olives have long been a sta­ple of local culi­nary cul­ture.

“It is crisp on the tooth and con­veys an unex­pected sense of fresh­ness,” Giovani said. ​“It does not feel like a prod­uct that has been processed for months; it seems like a fruit just taken from the tree and eaten.”

“It is crispy, the pulp is crispy, and when you bite it, it comes eas­ily off the pit, with the result of an enhanced taste,” he added.

Tasters detected fla­vors of cit­rus, pas­sion fruit, coconut, stewed peaches, fresh apple and green apples.

Another advan­tage of the new method is the sig­nif­i­cantly reduced pro­duc­tion times, rarely exceed­ing a few months.

Small batches of table olives were devel­oped in under eight weeks from pick­ing to mar­ket.

“We have not achieved large batches yet. I am devel­op­ing new bits, such as sen­sors and the pro­cess­ing equip­ment,” Fielke said.

The new approach also reduces water usage and labor, result­ing in lower pro­cess­ing costs.

Fielke taught and researched mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing for four decades, span­ning appli­ca­tions rang­ing from cereal farm­ing to dried fruits and almonds.

The lat­est research on the chem­istry of deb­it­ter­ing, the process that makes olives edi­ble, paved the way for devel­op­ing a new com­mer­cial process.

“Eventually, I met a per­son with an olive orchard. Also, my son bought a house that had six olive trees. So, that was the start of it,” Fielke said.

“We started with 40 kilo­grams of olives, moved up to 100 kilo­grams, then 1,000 kilo­grams and 7,000 kilo­grams after that,” he added.

Olives the Australian Way is work­ing with Cobram Estate, Australia’s largest olive pro­ducer, and a grow­ing num­ber of small fam­ily farms. 

Currently, pro­duc­tion is being scaled up to com­mer­cial lev­els in a loca­tion that was pre­vi­ously an olive fac­tory.

“It is a 20-year-old fac­tory, we moved in with our research project, and we just were awarded a 2 mil­lion Australian dol­lars (€1.3 mil­lion) fund­ing from the Australian gov­ern­ment for the next two years to look at the sci­ence of the fla­vors and the chem­istry,” Fielke explained.

While inves­ti­gat­ing phe­nols and other sig­nif­i­cant char­ac­ter­is­tics of the table olives, the new method is attract­ing inter­est from many out­side Australia.

“I don’t think we’re going to change the European table olives and what they like, but we might add to it their pro­duc­tion sys­tems,” Fielke said.

Californian and South African part­ners also expressed inter­est in licens­ing and devel­op­ing the method.

According to Fielke, Olives the Australian Way is pri­mar­ily aimed at meet­ing the seg­ment of con­sumers who have not yet devel­oped a taste for table olives.

“When I started, I was giv­ing taste tests and sell­ing pack­ets of olives in the farm­ers’ mar­kets. At least three-quar­ters of those who did not like tra­di­tional olives actu­ally liked my olives,” Fielke said.

“They told us: ​‘I never knew an olive could be fruity and oily and not bit­ter, not salty,’” he noted.

“My olives don’t shrivel up on the pizza. They hold their tex­ture and peo­ple say: ​‘wow, these olives are like eat­ing pineap­ple and fruit on your pizza, not like eat­ing anchovy,’” Fielke added.

While build­ing its demon­stra­tion facil­ity, the com­pany aims to attract the inter­est of more Australian com­pa­nies, enabling sig­nif­i­cant expan­sion of pro­duc­tion.

“We are rebuild­ing our process. We are build­ing an indus­try and a model to take this out to the world so that the whole world can expe­ri­ence our olives,” Fielke said.

“We’re not try­ing to take away the old mar­ket. We’re happy to sell to the peo­ple who want the new olives,” he con­cluded.