UC Davis Event to Focus on Premium Olive Oil

Olive oil importers, pro­duc­ers and chefs, among oth­ers, will gather next month at the Robert Mondavi Institute to dis­cuss the chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties fac­ing the high end of the extra vir­gin olive oil sec­tor.

“This event is not just about extra vir­gin that reaches the min­i­mum stan­dard, but about the best olive oils out there,” Dan Flynn, the direc­tor of the UC Davis Olive Center and one of the speak­ers at the event, told Olive Oil Times. ​“It’s about the fla­vors, oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges that con­sumers and pro­duc­ers are fac­ing in access­ing that oil.”

The idea for the event came out of some dis­cus­sions that Jean-Xavier Guinard, a pro­fes­sor of food sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy at UC Davis, had with Paolo Pasquali, the owner of Oleoteca Villa Campestri.

UC Davis had hosted sim­i­lar events in the past but had not done so in 10 years. The pair envi­sioned this event as an update on what is going on with pre­mium olive oil.

“All my efforts in the olive oil world, are [aimed at] cre­at­ing strate­gies and instru­ments to take olive oil from cost to profit,” Pasquali told Olive Oil Times. He will give the keynote pre­sen­ta­tion at the event and dis­cuss how his olive oil-cen­tric resort in Italy turns all of the costs of pro­duc­ing high-qual­ity olive oil into profit.

“My speech will be about the his­tory of Oleoteca Villa Campestri,” he said. ​“Producers will love the sys­tem [and] at the same time they will be encour­aged to reach the high­est stan­dard in olive oil pro­duc­tion.”

Pasquali said that he is also look­ing for­ward to meet­ing poten­tial investors in California.

Guinard will be pre­sent­ing his find­ings from a recent study at the event, which looked at a vari­ety of recipes that were pre­pared both with olive oil and with but­ter. Guinard, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Culinary Institute of America then did a con­sumer test on which of these recipe vari­a­tions con­sumers pre­ferred.

“The upshot was that, depend­ing on the prepa­ra­tion, con­sumers some­times pre­ferred but­ter and some­times olive oil,” Flynn said. ​“It will be pretty inter­est­ing for this audi­ence to hear about those results.”

One of the over­ar­ch­ing themes of the event will be talk­ing about mar­ket­ing and sell­ing high qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oils, so as to make pro­duc­ing these oils worth the time and effort. On that front, Karen Bond, the co-owner of Bondolio, will dis­cuss how her com­pany has been able to do just that.

“I will be speak­ing about all the steps a pro­ducer needs to take to get their extra vir­gin olive oil onto retail shelves as well as food ser­vice,” she told Olive Oil Times. ​“Most pro­duc­ers adhere to the myth that if you have an excel­lent prod­uct it will sell itself. This is so far from the truth. There is a method­i­cal process to suc­cess­fully sell­ing oil.”

“If steps are missed, the chances are higher that you will not sell your oil and will have left­over oil by your next har­vest,” she added. ​“I hope to teach pro­duc­ers this sim­ple process.”

Darrell Corti, an olive oil retailer in San Francisco, is sched­uled to dis­cuss the evo­lu­tion of con­sumer aware­ness of olive oil. He will be fol­lowed by Richard Armanino, an importer for ItalFoods, who will talk about the chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties of import­ing olive oil.

Greg Drescher, the vice pres­i­dent of strate­gic ini­tia­tives and indus­try lead­er­ship at the Culinary Institute of America, will then talk about how pro­duc­ers can max­i­mize the shelf space avail­able for their prod­ucts as well as give some per­spec­tive from the hos­pi­tal­ity indus­try point of view.

“Greg was out there from the begin­ning in push­ing this whole focus on pre­mium extra vir­gin olive oil,” Flynn said. ​“It will be inter­est­ing to see how he is view­ing it from a broad culi­nary per­spec­tive, deal­ing with shelf space, fine din­ing and the whole hos­pi­tal­ity sec­tor.”

The day will end with a con­ver­sa­tion about how pro­duc­ers can process this infor­ma­tion and how the indus­try can con­tinue to move the pre­mium end of the extra vir­gin olive oil sec­tor for­ward.

“My sense is that what we will get out oil this is a reflec­tion of how this indus­try has evolved over the past 10 years, in terms of the higher end of the qual­ity spec­trum and exam­in­ing the chal­lenges that remain for pro­duc­ers,” Flynn said.

The Olive Oil Day will take place on October 12 at the Robert Mondavi Institute in Davis, California. Admission is $50 and the last day to reg­is­ter online is October 5.

• UC Davis Olive Oil Day