Aussie olive oil producer expands presence in state

By Edgar Sanchez

On day four of the nearly nonstop fall harvest at Cobram Estate Olives, a machine roared to life in an orchard near Woodland.

Birds scattered in the olive trees lining 130 acres as the slow-moving harvester picked the fruit. Visitors wearing pink safety vests rode on the harvester’s overhead deck to view its handiwork as the 8-ton over-the-row machine performed the work of more than 100 laborers.

Each tree briefly found itself in the harvester’s central chamber—roughly 15-feet wide, 14-feet tall—where nylon sabers on either side flicked back and forth, stripping fruit off the branches. The green olives dropped onto conveyor belts for rapid transfer to waiting trucks, ready to deliver the crop to an extra-virgin-olive-oil mill at the company’s Woodland headquarters.

At Cobram Estate, immediacy is paramount for producing extra-virgin olive oil.

“Our olives go from tree to oil in four to six hours,” said James Clark, Cobram Estate’s vice president of sales and marketing. “Quality is the No. 1 thing we try to focus on.”

Cobram is an Australian firm with a presence in California. The company projects a doubling of production from last year, with 450,000 to 500,000 gallons of olive oil produced from its California crop after harvest’s end in late November.

With olive production varying between alternating low- and high-harvest years, the company said it hopes to turn out just over a million gallons next year.

The orchard where the Cobram Estate harvest began is one of several owned by the company in the Woodland area. Comprising about 1,000 acres with more than 150,000 trees, these orchards grow in tandem with another 4,000 acres owned by Northern California farmers contracted by Cobram to create extra-virgin olive oil. The firm’s California production falls under its Cobram Estate USA operations.

The state’s No. 1 producer, California Olive Ranch, has 4,600 acres of orchards in Corning, Artois and Oroville, and contracts another 4,000 acres.

Chris Zanobini, executive director of the Olive Oil Commission of California, said Cobram now ranks third, behind Stockton-based olive oil producer Corto Olive Co.

With its 32 California employees, including five from Australia, Cobram has emerged as a rising player in California olive oil production. In a media and “special VIP tour day” last month, Cobram Estate trumpeted its 2022 harvest, its olive oils and its aspirations for growth.

The company was founded in Australia in 1998 by Rob McGavin and Paul Riordan, who met in an agricultural college there. Olives had never been a big crop down under, so the two Aussies took a gamble.

It paid off. The company became a market leader in Australia’s extra-virgin olive oil industry. Eventually, McGavin and Riordan looked to expand.

“They were looking for what was next,” Clark said. “And California is perfectly aligned to grow olives” with its Mediterranean climate.

Cobram Estate Woodland began operations in 2015 as a standalone enterprise. Besides the mill, its 7-acre headquarters has an olive-testing lab, a bottling room and oil storage tanks—everything needed for extra-virgin olive oil production. The firm also has a nursery for its mother plants.

“At the root of our business, we are farmers,” Clark said. “We own the land, we harvest it, we do the whole process. A lot of other brands you see in supermarkets are just brands. They buy ingredients from farmers somewhere else, they co-pack it and then send it to their marketing arm.”

One of Cobram’s employees from Australia, Ebony Lanyon, has shuttled between the Woodland farm and another Cobram olive farm in Boort, Australia, for the past five years.

“This will be my 10th harvest” in both hemispheres, she said.

Cobram is now marketing itself as a producer and player in California, where olives grown for oil are valued at $41.5 million a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

California olive oil production comes from some 45 olive mills and more than 400 farms totaling over 37,000 acres. The Olive Oil Commission said grower-producers accounted for 3 million gallons of olive oil in 2021’s high-production year, up from 1.9 million gallons in 2020’s lower-yield cycle, but down from 3.6 million gallons in 2019.

This year, production is expected to drop to 1.8 million gallons, with freeze impacting orchards in Colusa and Sutter counties.

“Part of that is the alternating production, but cold weather we had in April also had a significant impact on the crop,” Zanobini said.

At Cobram’s harvest celebration, guests were provided with panoramic views of orchards and the harvester, which operates 22 hours a day. They viewed a company video and heard presentations on the firm’s commitment to freshly produced olive oil.

Even in the Old World, where olive cultivation began thousands of years ago, freshness is often lost, Clark said.

“Around the world, primarily in the Mediterranean and Spain, they have different people in each step of the olive oil production,” he said. “They have people growing the fruit, and then there’s a co-op mill. So you take your fruit to the mill. The mill makes the oil and sells it out to brand.

“Why does that matter?” Clark asked. “Because every time the fruit changes hands, there’s less focus on quality. And at every step, there are markups.”

By controlling the process, he said, Cobram follows best practices while keeping its retail prices affordable nationwide.

American consumers have a growing appetite for extra-virgin olive oil, partly because of its healthy attributes. Demand for California extra-virgin olive oil is outpacing supply, Clark said.

Against a backdrop of low extra-virgin olive oil supply growth, part of Cobram’s strategy is to aggressively persuade more independent olive growers to partner with it. Cobram contends that its planting techniques bring the partners greater yields.

With California in its third year of drought and a fourth predicted for 2023, Cobram officials say they remain optimistic.

Ciriaco Chavez, Cobram’s vice president of agriculture and industry affairs, noted that olives are an efficient crop for turning a drop of water into value.

Amid California’s water challenges, “many growers and farmers are looking to plant olives as an alternative to other crops because of their efficient water use,” Chavez said. “Olives only require 50% of the water that almonds and walnuts do.”

Cobram’s drip-irrigation system delivers the precise amount, with no drenching.

“Olives don’t like to be over-irrigated,” Chavez said.

(Edgar Sanchez is a reporter based in Sacramento. He may be contacted at edgar.chez@yahoo.com.)