Olive Oil Production Comes to French Capital

A group of neigh­bors in the south­ern Parisian sub­urb of Malakoff joined together late last year to pro­duce olive oil for the first time in the cap­i­tal region of Île-de-France.

Born to be Olive founder Vincent Chévrier told Radio France Internationale (RFI) that the group had har­vested 550 kilo­grams of olives from trees spread across the neigh­bor­hood.

Chévrier was inspired to unite his neigh­bors after real­iz­ing he could not har­vest enough fruit to pro­duce olive oil from his sin­gle olive tree.

“A lot of peo­ple have an olive tree in their gar­den. Every year, they see the olives that fall and do noth­ing since we don’t have a mill and can’t process them in Paris,” Chévrier said.

After going around the neigh­bor­hood, he iden­ti­fied 120 olive trees in a two-kilo­me­ter area grow­ing in pri­vate gar­dens and local parks.

He then set up a Facebook page to invite olive tree own­ers to join his ini­tia­tive. A group launched a crowd­fund­ing effort to buy har­vest­ing and milling equip­ment, includ­ing an elec­tric rake, nets, an olive grinder and a press.

During the inau­gural har­vest, res­i­dents looked on with curios­ity and excite­ment.

“Vincent rang our door­bell after spot­ting the olive tree in our gar­den,” a res­i­dent iden­ti­fied as Geraldine told RFI as Chévrier har­vested her tree using the recently pur­chased elec­tric rake. ​”I’m start­ing from scratch; I don’t know any­thing, but it is great fun to try.”

“It’s the first time we’ve been so orga­nized thanks to Vincent, and we’re also learn­ing to look after the tree,” she added. ​“It’s all a bit mag­i­cal to think you are going to make olive oil like this.”

Once all the olives were har­vested, which took about a month, the group crushed and pressed the fruit using tra­di­tional equip­ment and meth­ods.

Chévrier encour­aged res­i­dents who har­vested early to store their olives in the freezer until the whole neigh­bor­hood was ready to mill. 

While the final prod­uct may not qual­ify as extra vir­gin olive oil, neigh­bors insisted it is more about the expe­ri­ence than the result.

“People from every­where in town got together and decided to have this col­lec­tive project,” another res­i­dent named JoAnna told RFI. ​“It cre­ates links between peo­ple locally in a dif­fer­ent way… since they are get­ting together to con­sume some­thing they’ve made with their neigh­bors.”

Born to be Olive is part of a larger urban agri­cul­ture move­ment aim­ing to reduce the car­bon foot­print asso­ci­ated with food pro­duc­tion and trans­porta­tion.

Since 2016, urban agri­cul­ture in Paris has been gain­ing momen­tum, dri­ven by ini­tia­tives such as the Parisculteurs pro­gram, which facil­i­tates and accel­er­ates the instal­la­tion of agri­cul­tural projects within the city and the broader Île-de-France region. 

The idea is to use rooftops, walls, park­ing lots and open spaces to cre­ate urban farms and gar­dens. 

The Parisculteurs pro­gram has already estab­lished more than 70 projects, with just as many under devel­op­ment. 

Paris now boasts nearly 36 hectares of agri­cul­tural land within city lim­its, mak­ing it a leader in urban agri­cul­ture. 

The pro­gram also sup­ports edu­ca­tional and aware­ness-rais­ing activ­i­ties and train­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for aspir­ing urban farm­ers.

The south of France, espe­cially Provence, will undoubt­edly remain the country’s most pro­lific olive-grow­ing region, respon­si­ble for most of the 6,300 met­ric tons of olive oil expected to be pro­duced in the 2024/25 crop year.

However, Chévrier sees no rea­son why Parisians should not con­tinue to plant an olive tree or two and make olive oil. 

“You can per­fectly plant olive trees wher­ever you are in Paris and have very suc­cess­ful olive pro­duc­tion,” he con­cluded.

• Radio France Internationale