In Chile’s Curicó Valley, Agroindustrial Siracusa Builds an Olive Oil Success Story

Summary

Agroindustrial Siracusa in Chile has suc­cess­fully devel­oped an award-win­ning olive farm­ing and milling oper­a­tion in the Curicó Valley, focus­ing on Spanish olive vari­eties due to bet­ter per­for­mance. Despite fac­ing chal­lenges like a short har­vest win­dow and lower oil yields, the com­pany main­tains a com­pet­i­tive edge through invest­ments in water infra­struc­ture, pre­ci­sion agri­cul­ture, and par­tic­i­pa­tion in inter­na­tional com­pe­ti­tions.

In less than two decades, the engi­neer­ing and indus­trial firm Agroindustrial Siracusa has trans­formed the fer­tile soils of a small cor­ner of Chile’s Curicó Valley into an award-win­ning olive farm­ing and milling oper­a­tion.

General man­ager Felipe Juillerat told Olive Oil Times that the jour­ney to the company’s sec­ond award-win­ning year at the 2025 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition began when the Agroindustrial Siracusa’s own­ers sought to diver­sify into the agri­cul­ture busi­ness back in 2006. 

The com­pany was already involved in salmon farm­ing and house con­struc­tion, and the own­ers wanted to invest in a crop involv­ing an indus­trial process, given the group’s engi­neer­ing back­ground.

At the time in Chile, the olive oil indus­try was begin­ning to take root, with many new super-high-den­sity olive groves being planted in hedgerows, cen­tered around a large mill. 

The own­ers even­tu­ally set­tled on a piece of land in the Curicó Valley, approx­i­mately three hours south of Santiago, and planted 500 hectares of olive trees in 2007, fol­lowed by an addi­tional 750 hectares in 2010.

The first olive vari­eties the com­pany planted were Arbequina and Arbosana, fol­lowed by Frantoio, Leccino and Coratina. 

“The Italian vari­eties did not do so well com­pared to the Spanish ones, so we had to take them out,” Juillerat said, not­ing the impacts of the cli­matic con­di­tions on their pro­duc­tion as well as the prac­ti­cal lim­i­ta­tions of not being able to per­form a mechan­i­cal har­vest.

“The two Spanish ones worked much bet­ter,” he added. Later on, the com­pany also planted Picual and Koroneiki, which con­tribute to its blends. Even so, Arbequina and Arbosana remain the dom­i­nant vari­eties.

Among the main chal­lenges fac­ing the pro­duc­ers of Aura Olive Oil and its three brands, Aura Classic, Aura Arbequina, and Aura Special Edition, is the rel­a­tively short win­dow the com­pany has to har­vest, which typ­i­cally begins in mid-April and lasts for about 40 to 45 days.

“Our area is on the south­ern lim­its of olive oil pro­duc­tion, and we have a short stretch of time to har­vest our fruit to avoid the start of the win­ter rains from June 15^th onwards,” Juillerat said.

The com­pany also aims to wrap up the har­vest in the first weeks of June to avoid late autumn frosts, which can dam­age the olives and result in defects in the oil.

“That’s a chal­lenge, but on the other hand, what we can get in this small win­dow is a very good, pre­mium olive oil,” Juillerat said.

While the olives are still green at the start of the har­vest, Juillerat said the higher polyphe­nol con­tents and intense green fruity aro­mas and fla­vors more than make up for the low oil yields.

He esti­mated that at the start of the har­vest, oil yields sit around 13 per­cent, ris­ing to about 17 per­cent at the end of the har­vest.

Juillerat added that this puts the com­pany at a com­pet­i­tive dis­ad­van­tage in terms of vol­ume com­pared to the yields of 20 per­cent or more that pro­duc­ers in the north of the coun­try receive at the end of June and into July, where rain and frost are not lim­it­ing fac­tors to the same degree.

While many pro­duc­ers in Chile, espe­cially in the north of the coun­try, have had to deal with the impacts of drought and water short­ages in recent years, Juillerat said these issues were less press­ing in the south of the coun­try.

Furthermore, one of the first invest­ments Agroindustrial Siracusa made when it bought the prop­erty was in water and irri­ga­tion infra­struc­ture.

The com­pany installed tub­ing to bring water from a nearby river to fill a series of reser­voirs, rang­ing in size from five to 730 mil­lion liters. Along with draw­ing some water from the river, the reser­voirs also cap­ture win­ter runoff from the sur­round­ing Andes moun­tains.

Even though aver­age pre­cip­i­ta­tion has been nor­mal for the past few years, Juillerat said the com­pany has invested sig­nif­i­cantly in pre­ci­sion agri­cul­ture, installing sen­sors to mea­sure soil humid­ity and a small weather sta­tion to record tem­per­a­ture, humid­ity and pre­cip­i­ta­tion.

Similar to many pro­duc­ers across the coun­try, Juillerat reported that the com­pany enjoyed a rebound har­vest in 2025, with pro­duc­tion ris­ing by eight per­cent com­pared to the his­tor­i­cally poor har­vest of 2024.

“We had a win­ter with rel­a­tively nor­mal rain­fall, allow­ing us to start spring with the reser­voir at full capac­ity,” he said. ​“Spring fol­lowed with nor­mal to high tem­per­a­tures into sum­mer, and bud­break and flow­er­ing were nor­mal.”

However, extreme sum­mer tem­per­a­tures and a lack of water in February con­tributed to smaller fruit sizes in the Arbosana, cre­at­ing chal­lenges in the mill to max­i­mize yield while pre­serv­ing qual­ity. 

“In terms of oil qual­ity, we did­n’t have any major dif­fi­cul­ties; per­haps the biggest chal­lenge was that we were faced with a lot of very small fruit, with a high per­cent­age of pits in the paste,” Juillerat said. ​“But we were ulti­mately able to obtain good oils of vary­ing inten­si­ties.”

Despite the chal­lenges, Agroindustrial Siracusa earned a Silver Award for its Aurora Arbequina mono­va­ri­etal at the 2025 edi­tion of the World Competition.

“The NYIOOC is very impor­tant to us because we see the impor­tance of this award to our clients,” Juillerat said, adding that Aura Olive Oil would con­tinue to par­tic­i­pate in the NYIOOC and two or three other com­pe­ti­tions in key mar­kets.

Juillerat also high­lighted how the acco­lades, includ­ing a Gold Award at the 2021 NYIOOC for its Aurora Premium blend, have increased the value of the company’s sales in its largest export mar­ket. 

Despite the ten per­cent tar­iff that Chilean olive oil exports to the U.S. face, Juillerat said the Aura Olive Oil con­tin­ues to work with its usual clients and has not seen any change in demand.

“We’re at a cer­tain advan­tage against other mar­kets that face higher tar­iffs than we do,” he said, cit­ing the 15 per­cent tar­iff imposed by the U.S. on European Union exports. ​“In the end, the tar­iff has not gone against our prices.” 

Outside the U.S., the com­pany also exports sig­nif­i­cant quan­ti­ties to Colombia and Paraguay, and makes smaller ship­ments of its olive oil to Brazil, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. 

Aura Olive Oil’s sales are almost evenly divided between exports and the domes­tic mar­ket, with the com­pany sell­ing its three brands through sev­eral retail­ers across the coun­try and pro­duc­ing pri­vate-label olive oil. 

“We’re very bal­anced between exports, which are about 85 per­cent in bulk, and what we sell here in Chile, which is about 95 per­cent bot­tled,” he said.

According to International Olive Council data, Chile has con­sumed an aver­age of 7,666 met­ric tons of olive oil annu­ally since the start of the Covid-19 pan­demic in 2020, when annual con­sump­tion momen­tar­ily spiked to 14,000 tons.

Since the pan­demic, Juillerat said that stub­born infla­tion has plagued the coun­try and dri­ven down con­sumer spend­ing.

“However, olive oil con­sump­tion did­n’t fall as much as expected,” he said. ​“We con­cluded that peo­ple are rec­og­niz­ing the ben­e­fits of olive oil and con­tinue to con­sume it.”

The nature of the country’s olive oil con­sump­tion has also changed. Whereas it used to be focused on the Santiago met­ro­pol­i­tan area, home to just under seven mil­lion peo­ple, slightly more than one-third of the pop­u­la­tion, Juillerat said the com­pany is increas­ingly sell­ing to restau­rants and con­sumers out­side of the cap­i­tal, par­tic­u­larly in Patagonia.

“We have restau­rants and dis­trib­u­tors here in Santiago, and we have dis­trib­u­tors down in Patagonia,” he said. ​“A lot of young pro­fes­sion­als are mov­ing down there,” and bring­ing their olive oil con­sump­tion habits with them. 

Looking ahead to the 2026 har­vest, Juillerat warned that it is still too early in the sea­son to make any pre­dic­tions, but he is already see­ing mixed indi­ca­tors in the groves. 

“We’re already in the bud­ding stage, and it looks var­ied. Arbequina has a greater flower sup­ply, while Arbosana has a more var­ied appear­ance; there are areas with good bud­ding and oth­ers with more decline,” he said. ​“Extreme sum­mer tem­per­a­tures and water avail­abil­ity are the main causes of the bud­ding we’re see­ing now.”