Award-Winning Catalan Producer Bets on Growing Demand for Arbequina

After another chal­leng­ing har­vest in Catalonia, the pro­duc­ers behind Gaudea are cel­e­brat­ing their debut award at the 2024 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition.

Situated in Lleida, about 100 kilo­me­ters west of Barcelona, the fam­ily com­pany earned a Silver Award for a medium-inten­sity Arbequina native to Catalonia.

“We are very excited to have won the Silver Award at the NYIOOC,” said Alba Comadran Turu, a spokes­woman for the com­pany. ​“This recog­ni­tion means a lot to us and is a tes­ta­ment to the hard work and ded­i­ca­tion our team has invested in the pro­duc­tion of our pre­mium Gaudea Signature oil.”

Originally ded­i­cated to grow­ing grains, the com­pany shifted its focus to extra vir­gin olive oil pro­duc­tion in 2009.

Since then, Gaudea has expanded from 52 hectares of Arbequina groves to 75 hectares cur­rently in pro­duc­tion. Gerardo Camps, the company’s direc­tor, said there will be 150 hectares in pro­duc­tion in the com­ing years.

Gaudea’s extra vir­gin olive oil is cer­ti­fied with the Les Garrigues Protected Designation of Origin from the European Union. ​“Our oil has a bit­ter and spicy pro­file,” Camps said. ​“It is a sweet and mild oil with a high fruiti­ness.”

According to Les Garrigues reg­u­la­tory con­sor­tium, which applied for the PDO, extra vir­gin olive oil must be made with Arbequina or Verdiell olives and is char­ac­ter­ized as ​“fruity: green­ish in color with a taste of bit­ter almonds, and sweet.”

The Gaudea fam­ily cel­e­brated the award’s announce­ment, which capped off a chal­leng­ing har­vest in Catalonia, Spain’s fourth-largest olive oil-pro­duc­ing region.

“We had a 40 per­cent reduc­tion in the har­vest because there was a heat wave at the time of blos­som­ing that burned the flow­ers and resulted in fewer olives being pro­duced,” Camps said.

In a typ­i­cal year, the com­pany pro­duces about 100,000 liters of olive oil from its super-high-den­sity groves. However, this year, the com­pany pro­duced 60,000 liters.

Overall, data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food show that Catalonia pro­duced 31,224 tons of olive oil in the 2023/24 crop year, an increase from last year’s his­toric low. Lleida was respon­si­ble for 8,667 tons.

With plenty of flow­ers on the olive trees, there is hope that pro­duc­tion could increase again in the 2024/25 crop year.

“But there is still a lot of time for things to change,” Camps said. ​“We will have a bet­ter idea after June or July when the trees have fin­ished blos­som­ing and olive dru­pes begin to form.”

Camps wor­ries that a pre­ma­ture heat wave could once again hurt pro­duc­tion. ​“At this time last year, there were many flow­ers on the trees, but the heat wave dam­aged them,” he said.

Along with high tem­per­a­tures in the spring, Camps said that unsea­son­ably hot weather in October, when the har­vest begins, is another chal­lenge the com­pany has faced in recent years.

“In October, it is still very hot, and tem­per­a­tures reach 30 ºC on many days,” he said. ​“We start at 7:15 a.m. when the sun rises and fin­ish by 10 or 11 a.m.”

Camps would start even ear­lier, but he har­vests the super-high-den­sity groves mechan­i­cally, and a ban on night­time mechan­i­cal har­vest­ing means he can­not begin before day­break.

By noon, when tem­per­a­tures reach their daily max­i­mum, Camps said the olives and the oil inside them are already begin­ning to heat. Thus, har­vest­ing fin­ishes for the day, and the focus shifts to trans­port­ing the olives to a local mill.

Gaudea has invested in cool­ing sys­tems to store the olives below 27 ºC while they are trans­ported to the mill and until they are trans­formed into olive oil.

“This way, we pro­duce an olive oil that is fruity and more bit­ter,” he said. The com­pany also plans to build a mill in the com­ing years.

While high spring tem­per­a­tures remain the pri­mary con­cern, the com­pany has also invested to hedge against the ris­ing annual prob­a­bil­i­ties of severe drought.

Eastern Catalonia has expe­ri­enced an extreme drought over the past year, with water restric­tions in place in Barcelona and Girona. In Lleida, Camps said there has been enough rain dur­ing the win­ter, and reser­voirs remain at ade­quate lev­els to ensure no restric­tions.

However, the Gaudea team has plans to adapt to Spain’s chang­ing cli­mate. Experts antic­i­pate the Iberian penin­sula to become steadily hot­ter and drier over the com­ing decades.

All of the company’s olive groves have drip irri­ga­tion sys­tems, and the team care­fully mon­i­tors pre­cip­i­ta­tion lev­els and soil mois­ture to use water as effi­ciently as pos­si­ble. ​“You don’t need as much water as before; with drip irri­ga­tion, we achieve the same results with less water,” Camps said.

Despite these chal­lenges, pro­duc­tion and sales con­tinue to increase. High prices at ori­gin and lower avail­abil­ity over the past two years have meant that sales have slowed slightly over the past year and a half, but Camps believes the upward trend will con­tinue.

Camps said the higher prices have helped bal­ance out sig­nif­i­cantly higher pro­duc­tion costs.

“Production costs have increased by 50 per­cent for phy­tosan­i­tary prod­ucts, fer­til­iz­ers and worker com­pen­sa­tion,” he said. ​“Considering the lower pro­duc­tion, the price of pro­duc­ing a kilo­gram of olive oil is about €6.”

Once the har­vests return to nor­mal lev­els, he antic­i­pates that prices at the ori­gin will set­tle around €6 or €7 per kilo­gram, which he said is good for con­sumers and pro­duc­ers.

According to Infaoliva, extra vir­gin olive oil prices at ori­gin are cur­rently €7.140 per kilo­gram, down from the record-high €8.988 per kilo­gram in mid-January.

While the high prices at ori­gin resulted in a shift in con­sumer behav­ior, Camps said they are a wel­come change from the lows recorded through­out the 2019/20 crop year.

At the time, prices hov­ered around €2 per kilo­gram, and many farm­ers and millers could not cover pro­duc­tion costs.

Despite chal­lenges sur­round­ing higher costs and cli­mate change, Camps remains opti­mistic about the sec­tor’s tra­jec­tory.

“Prices have almost dou­bled in the past year, but demand has remained very good,” he said. While con­sump­tion in Spain has fallen sig­nif­i­cantly due to lower avail­abil­ity, con­sumers are buy­ing almost all the avail­able olive oil.

“With each pass­ing year, con­sumers con­tinue to attribute more value to olive oil, and they con­tinue to buy high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil despite the higher prices,” Camps con­cluded.