Albanian Producer Pairs Local Culture, Award-Winning Quality

Summary

Bianti Danaj, founder of Donika Olive Oil, aims to pro­mote Albania and its endemic Kalinjot vari­ety in the olive oil world, focus­ing on qual­ity over quan­tity. The com­pany won a Gold Award for their Premium brand at the 2025 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, and Danaj plans to increase polyphe­nol con­tent while main­tain­ing fla­vor bal­ance by skip­ping the decant­ing step in pro­duc­tion.

Bianti Danaj, founder of Donika Olive Oil, is on a mis­sion to put his native coun­try of Albania and its endemic Kalinjot vari­ety on the olive oil world map.

Despite steadily increas­ing olive oil pro­duc­tion — the International Olive Council fore­casted Albania would pro­duce 30,000 met­ric tons in the 2024/25 crop year — Danaj said the south­east­ern European coun­try would never com­pete with other large olive oil pro­duc­ers in the region in terms of quan­tity.

”We’re com­pet­ing to have the best fla­vor and aroma, bit­ter­ness and pep­per­i­ness,” he told Olive Oil Times, ​“but we also are com­pet­ing to have as many polyphe­nols as pos­si­ble while keep­ing every­thing in bal­ance.”

To that end, Danaj and the rest of the team at Donika Olive Oil cel­e­brated win­ning a Gold Award for their Premium brand, an organic Kalinjot mono­va­ri­etal, at the 2025 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition. The com­pany pre­vi­ously won a Silver Award for the same oil in 2024.

While the pro­ducer per­formed lit­tle dif­fer­ently between the two har­vests, Danaj said an upgrade to the malaxer and bet­ter stor­age con­di­tions may have con­tributed.

His milling team replaced the blades of the company’s malaxer with hol­low blades that can be cooled with water, allow­ing them to keep the malax­ing tem­per­a­ture at 22ºC. 

“The blades remain at a con­stant tem­per­a­ture, and before they used to heat up because of the move­ment,” he said, allow­ing the paste to reach 25 ºC. 

Danaj said the goal is to keep the paste from over­heat­ing and los­ing favor­able organolep­tic prop­er­ties.

Once the extra vir­gin olive oil has been decanted and fil­tered, it is pumped into under­ground stor­age tanks until it is bot­tled to order. ​“The olive oil has the least amount of con­tact with oxy­gen as pos­si­ble,” Danaj said. 

“There is still room for improve­ment in stor­age and fil­tra­tion,” he added. ​“We can do a much bet­ter job.”

Next year, Danaj will skip the decant­ing step and fil­ter the oil imme­di­ately after pro­duc­tion, increas­ing the num­ber of fil­ter plaques the mill uses and rais­ing the pro­duc­tion cost.

“Right now, we are more mis­sion-based than profit-focused,” he said. ​“Of course we’re mak­ing money to sus­tain our­selves, but we truly believe in pro­duc­ing the best prod­uct… and we believed that leav­ing the olive oil to decant was dimin­ish­ing this.”

Danaj will skip the decant­ing step mainly to pre­serve the nat­u­rally abun­dant polyphe­nols in Kalinjot olives. Donika Premium has about 800 mil­ligrams per kilo­gram, far exceed­ing the 250 required for the med­i­c­i­nal claims required by E.U. Regulation 432/2012.

He aims to reach 1,000 mil­ligrams per kilo­gram of polyphe­nols while main­tain­ing a har­mo­nious fru­ti­ness, bit­ter­ness and spici­ness.

Along with the cli­mate and soil con­di­tions of the south­ern region of Vlorë, Danaj’s team har­vests the fruit early from the crowns of the trees, select­ing the olives with the most expo­sure to the sun. 

While har­vest­ing early sac­ri­fices quan­tity, it allows for more polyphe­nols in the result­ing extra vir­gin olive oil.

The har­vested olives are placed into bas­kets and trans­ported to the mill in three-hour inter­vals to com­plete the milling process as quickly as pos­si­ble.

Among the annual chal­lenges of the olive har­vest in Albania are the coun­try’s moun­tain­ous ter­rain and the poor infra­struc­ture in some rural areas.

“ The ter­rain here is very dif­fi­cult and hilly… some­times you can only trans­port olives with don­keys or horses… to a main road to take to the mill in a truck,” Danaj said. ​“When every­one har­vests at the same time, there can be bid­ding wars for the lim­ited num­ber of don­keys and trucks.”

Due to the moun­tain­ous ter­rain, it is also impos­si­ble for most pro­duc­ers to mech­a­nize the har­vest. Fragmented land own­er­ship means that many farm­ers own small plots of land, mak­ing it more dif­fi­cult to achieve economies of scale.

“ We can­not [pro­duce at scale], but we can pro­duce very high-qual­ity olive oil from the local vari­ety,” Danaj said.

He believes focus­ing on its Albanian iden­tity will help raise brand aware­ness in Donika’s export mar­kets — the com­pany mainly sells olive oil in the United States but is also work­ing to enter Australia, China, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom — and pro­mote Albanian extra vir­gin olive oil abroad more gen­er­ally.

Donika is named after Donika Kastrioti, the grand princess of Albania who was born in what is now Vlorë County and mar­ried Gjergj Kastrioti. 

Kastrioti, who was viewed as one of the country’s national heroes, and his wife fought for Albania’s inde­pen­dence from the Ottoman Empire in the mid-fif­teenth cen­tury.

“ One of the rea­sons we started Donika is to do what Italy did in the 1980s,” Danaj said, ref­er­enc­ing the Made in Italy ini­tia­tive, which is par­tially cred­ited for the country’s decades-long dom­i­nance in the U.S. olive oil mar­ket. ​“We’re focus­ing on Albania and Kalinjot, which many peo­ple have never heard of.” 

Danaj said there are signs that the Albania and polyphe­nol-cen­tric mar­ket­ing strate­gies are work­ing. He said some stores in California, where the olive oil retails at a pre­mium price, have partly dri­ven sales by telling the brand’s story.

“We have the foot­print of suc­cess. We just haven’t done it mas­sively yet,” Danaj said. ​“I think this is going to be our year, where we aim to have as many retail part­ners as pos­si­ble [telling that story] and increase our online sales.”