A 'Keurig' for Olive Oil

The sec­ond edi­tion of Seeds & Chips, an inter­na­tional sum­mit ded­i­cated to food inno­va­tion, brought star­tups, com­pa­nies in food and tech, investors, thought lead­ers and pol­i­cy­mak­ers to Milan for four days of con­fer­ences, net­work­ing, and a hackathon focused on food tech­nol­ogy and the ​‘Internet of Food.’ It’s where we dis­cov­ered two star­tups devel­op­ing inno­v­a­tive projects fea­tur­ing EVOO.

RevOILution

Following on the emer­gence of Keurig-like devices for every­thing from juices and soups to mar­i­juana, an Italian startup has designed a counter-top appli­ance for press­ing your own olive oil on the spot.

“RevOILution is the only solu­tion in the world to offer extra vir­gin olive oil ​‘espresso,’ ” said the CEO and founder of the project, Antonio Pagliaro. ​“We allow you to have fresh extra vir­gin olive oil at any time of the year cus­tomized accord­ing to your taste.”

By press­ing a but­ton on the small device you will obtain, in about 45 min­utes, 20 serv­ings of cus­tom-made EVOO. The appli­ance employs a ​‘Bag d’O’ — ​“olive pulp from dif­fer­ent vari­eties, with­out pits, accu­rately selected and frozen, in order to obtain a high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil,” Pagliaro explained. The resid­ual part can be reused to make an olive tape­nade.

“Our RevOILution allows you to have extra vir­gin olive oil when­ever you want, elud­ing the loss of nutri­tional qual­ity and aro­matic inten­sity that occur over time,” Pagliaro explained. The device will be avail­able by the end of 2016. ​“After two years of research, thanks to the col­lab­o­ra­tion of uni­ver­si­ties, com­pa­nies in the sec­tor, grow­ers and research cen­ters, every­one will be able to pro­duce his own EVOO at home.”

RevOILution Pro will be the next step. Designed for those who already have their olives, it will pro­duce up to 1 liter of extra vir­gin olive oil, press­ing the whole fruits. It will be avail­able in a lim­ited num­ber.

The RevOILution team includes Antonio Pagliaro, a finance and mar­ket­ing entre­pre­neur; Francesco Buzzo and Serena Lambertoni, award-win­ning design­ers (Lambertoni is a mem­ber of Mensa); Gianni Orazietti, with 40 years of expe­ri­ence in the field of olive oil machin­ery; and Giuseppe Schipani who takes care of the dig­i­tal sec­tor and e‑commerce. About 30 peo­ple were involved in the project, includ­ing col­lab­o­ra­tors from the University of Tuscia.

OOXX

“OOXX (Olive Oil eXtra eXperience) speaks to those who want to live a new and emo­tional food expe­ri­ence, and to exploit extra vir­gin olive oil qual­i­ties and nutri­tional processes,” said Stefania Saitta, direc­tor of Italolive.

Born of an idea of Rosalinda Lopergolo, a founder of the startup, OOXX offers a solu­tion to those who have already cho­sen to con­sume healthy and qual­ity foods but ignore the poten­tial of extra vir­gin olive oil. ​“The ben­e­fi­cial effects of EVOO are pre­served if and only when the entire con­ser­va­tion process is safe­guarded. In this sense, the ​‘ene­mies’ to be fought are low or high tem­per­a­tures, oxi­da­tion and expo­sure to light,” Saitta explained.

The OOXX sys­tem allows an effec­tive con­trol of the TOL (tem­per­a­ture, oxy­gen, light) effects. It con­tains eight sin­gle-dose (10 ml) glass ampoules with dif­fer­ent types of Italian olive oils kept in dark­ness at a cool and con­stant tem­per­a­ture between 10 and 15°C (50 – 59°F). Thanks to its pas­sive cool­ing sys­tem, OOXX promises to keep a ​‘mill-fresh’ prod­uct on the table for up to two hours.

“OOXX pro­vides tech­nol­ogy, inno­va­tion and design through a three-step process: Selection of high qual­ity pro­duc­ers; cer­ti­fied bot­tling pro­to­cols and con­trolled logis­tics, tem­per­a­ture-con­trolled trans­port and stor­age through ded­i­cated dis­tri­b­u­tion; and the use of OOXX BOX, the inno­v­a­tive ele­ment that rep­re­sents the syn­the­sis of the OOXX process and its nat­ural con­tin­u­a­tion on the table,” the direc­tor explained. ​“The project pro­vides for the involve­ment of a wide and selected range of Italian olive mills, in order to allow the con­sumer to choose from the best EVOOs rep­re­sent­ing all of our ter­ri­to­ries.”

The Italolive team con­sists of the pres­i­dent, Ivano Prencipe; the cre­ator of the project, Rosalinda Lopergolo; Stefania Saitta and Francesco Mussa and Alessia Sarcinelli.