Israeli Firm Prepares to Launch Countertop Olive Oil Appliance

After over a decade of devel­op­ment, a team of Israeli entre­pre­neurs say they are prepar­ing to launch a coun­ter­top olive oil pro­duc­tion appli­ance: the Olive X‑Press.

Like the Spanish Olimaker, launched in 2020, the device would allow con­sumers to trans­form 3 kilo­grams of freshly har­vested or spe­cially treated and vac­uum-pack­aged olives into olive oil at home in 45 min­utes.

“This is the small­est olive press­ing machine in the world,” Nir Padan, the chief exec­u­tive of Olive X‑Press, told Olive Oil Times. ​“This was a very chal­leng­ing project. It is not easy to cre­ate such a machine.”

Padan said the biggest hur­dle to over­come was com­bin­ing the three main steps of olive oil pro­duc­tion – grind­ing, malax­ing and decant­ing – into a coun­ter­top appli­ance ​“the size of a cof­fee machine.”

“To pen­e­trate the home kitchen, you want to have only one engine. You want to have a very silent machine, small and easy to wash,” he said, adding that they must also be easy to assem­ble and dis­as­sem­ble. ​“This is totally dif­fer­ent type of ven­ture.”

In a patent sub­mit­ted to author­i­ties in the United States, the inven­tors said they ulti­mately decided to use pres­sure instead of fric­tion, the method employed in ham­mer­mills, to extract the oil. The for­mer method trans­forms the olives at lower tem­per­a­tures and more qui­etly.

“The present inven­tion is aimed at pro­vid­ing a low speed, low torque process for break­ing the olive stone,” the inven­tors wrote in the patent. ​“The low-speed process pre­vents over­heat­ing dur­ing olive pro­cess­ing.”

“Additionally, low torque and speed result in a small, light and low energy con­sump­tion motor, which is suit­able for a home appli­ance,” they added. ​“Low speed also reduces noises and enables shar­ing the same rota­tional speed of dif­fer­ent phases in the process.”

The Olive X‑Press resem­bles a cross between an ordi­nary food proces­sor and a cof­fee machine. While the final design has not been com­pleted, Padan indi­cated that an outer cover would house the device and its exter­nal motor.

“After we pro­vide the work­ing mech­a­nism in wide­spread tests, we will go into detail about the outer shape and design, which will make the prod­uct a very nice-look­ing machine for retail,” Padan said.

The device is a frus­tum, a con­i­cal cylin­der with a smaller top diam­e­ter and larger base diam­e­ter. Olives are placed on a plat­form on the device and intro­duced to the crusher.

Once the pit is crushed, the result­ing olive paste fil­ters down to a malax­a­tion bowl at the bot­tom of the frus­tum, where the paste is kneaded for 30 to 40 min­utes to increase the size of the oil droplets.

Afterward, the malaxed paste is pressed to sep­a­rate the solids from the liq­uids – water and olive oil. The liq­uid then passes through a ver­ti­cal fil­ter, and the olive oil is fur­ther sep­a­rated from the water by den­sity.

Padan said the pro­to­type would undergo rig­or­ous test­ing and should be ready for a lim­ited mar­ket intro­duc­tion before the 2024 olive har­vest. He expects to sell the appli­ance for about $250 (€233).

“Before the next har­vest sea­son in the north­ern hemi­sphere, we will sell house­hold coun­ter­tops in the world using deal­ers,” he said. ​“We will start with the peo­ple who grow olives, who live near olive trees.”

Along with sell­ing the appli­ance, Padan said the com­pany would make most of its rev­enue from sell­ing the vac­uum-pack­aged olives to trans­form in the appli­ance, com­par­ing the approach to those of Nespresso pods.

“This means that we had to develop an extended shelf life for fresh olives,” he said. ​“The prob­lem we had to solve. Previously, the only way today to press a high-qual­ity oil is on the day of the har­vest.”

“To solve this, we are giv­ing the olives a nat­ural treat­ment, which is non­chem­i­cal,” Padan added, ​“After this treat­ment, we are clos­ing the olives in a vac­uum pack­age. Also, we store the pack­aged olives in the fridge. The pack­aged olives can be used for more than one year in order to press a fresh olive oil.”

Padan said the treat­ment included antiox­i­dants but declined to go into specifics, cit­ing the need to remain com­pet­i­tive.

The com­pany plans to license the tech­nol­ogy, X‑Tend, to allow olive grow­ers world­wide to pre­pare olives for the machine using the process that could be sold to con­sumers.

Padan said this would also cre­ate a wide vari­ety of options, from mild Arbequinas and pun­gent Coratinas to far less com­mon vari­eties usu­ally con­fined to small geo­gra­phies.

Padan insists that the olive oil cre­ated by the Olive X‑Press tastes just as good as freshly milled extra vir­gin olive oil. His claim has been sup­ported by Zohar Kerem, a pro­fes­sor of food chem­istry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who con­sulted on the project.

Kerem and his team ana­lyzed the olive oil pro­duced by the Olive X‑Press using stan­dard phys­io­chem­i­cal and organolep­tic tests to deter­mine the olive oil grade and qual­ity.

Describing the results of his study in a let­ter to Padan, which was seen by Olive Oil Times, Kerem said the lev­els of health-pro­mot­ing com­pounds, includ­ing polyphe­nols, in olive oil pro­duced by the Olive X‑Press were sim­i­lar to fresh extra vir­gin olive oils.

The researchers also found the olive oil pro­duced by the Olive X‑Press has a shelf-life sim­i­lar to con­ven­tion­ally pro­duced olive oil.

“An oil pro­duced from fruits treated and stored as above is equal in com­po­si­tion to oil pressed today by com­mer­cial mills,” Kerem wrote. ​“The Olive X‑Tend novel tech­nol­ogy has actu­ally extended the har­vest sea­son and fresh olive oil avail­abil­ity from three months to year-round.”

Ahead of the ini­tial release of the Olive X‑Press for retail, Padan is busy trav­el­ing, look­ing for cus­tomers and fundrais­ing. He said the com­pany had already raised $3.5 mil­lion (€3.26 mil­lion) for the project and plans to con­tinue these efforts, includ­ing a September visit to New York City to meet investors.

When Olive Oil Times first con­tacted Padan to dis­cuss the device, he answered the phone from a busy restau­rant in Tokyo after sign­ing a mem­o­ran­dum of under­stand­ing with his first client.

“They will be the first to pur­chase our coun­ter­top and go to mar­ket with the machine,” Padan said.

He believes that Japan is an ideal mar­ket to launch the device. According to the International Olive Council, Japan con­sumed 57,000 tons of olive oil in the 2021/22 crop year. Separate data from the Spanish Institute of Foreign Trade found per capita con­sump­tion remains at 0.4 liters per annum.

However, Padan is bet­ting on Olive X‑Press to deliver the high-qual­ity prod­ucts that Japanese con­sumers seek.

“I can see it clearly now a few times after vis­it­ing,” he said. ​“The Japanese con­sumer really appre­ci­ates high-qual­ity and fresh food, and they are will­ing to pay.”