Italy Set to Invest €100M for Olive Mill Upgrades

Across Italy, olive mills are set to receive invest­ment for sig­nif­i­cant upgrades. After com­plet­ing a qual­i­fy­ing process that began this sum­mer, pro­duc­ers across the coun­try will start receiv­ing the funds in May 2026.

“Successful milling oper­a­tions do not only depend on new tech­nolo­gies applied to the milling process, they need to be part of a cul­tural approach which puts qual­ity and sus­tain­abil­ity at its core,” Lucia Mangialasche, co-owner of Frantoio Il Nocciolino in the cen­tral Italian region of Umbria, told Olive Oil Times.

“To pro­duce qual­ity, you need to research and invest and, as a milling com­pany, be part of the change in your ter­ri­tory,” she added.

Il Nocciolino is a fairly new olive milling com­pany. Its cre­ative approach to inno­va­tion is part of a broader tran­si­tion of many Umbrian olive oil pro­duc­ers, includ­ing small ones.

One of their cus­tomers, Cultura Viva, won its sec­ond-con­sec­u­tive Gold Award at the 2023 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition.

The €100 mil­lion of pub­lic fund­ing pro­vided by the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan for milling inno­va­tion comes from the broader €750 bil­lion European Union ini­tia­tive known as ​“Next Generation E.U.”

In Umbria, €3.7 mil­lion will be used to sus­tain milling inno­va­tion. Meanwhile, €8.3 mil­lion will be invested in neigh­bor­ing Tuscany, a region renowned for its high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oils.

About half of those funds will reach com­pa­nies in south­ern Italy, where most of the country’s olive oil pro­duc­tion occurs. In Puglia, millers will share €27 mil­lion, with their Calabrian and Sicilian coun­ter­parts receiv­ing €16.5 mil­lion and €13 mil­lion, respec­tively.

Still, upgrad­ing olive oil mill tech­nolo­gies means more than deploy­ing new extrac­tion processes.

“As grad­u­ated agrar­ian experts, we focused on inno­va­tion from the start of oper­a­tions in 2011. Our vision was not always fully sup­ported by local farm­ers,” Mangialasche said.

Olive oil pro­duc­tion in regions such as Umbria comes from a long tra­di­tion and is part of the local iden­tity.

“In the begin­ning, many small pro­duc­ers, often aim­ing to pro­duce olive oil for self-con­sump­tion, did not share our enthu­si­asm for the new fron­tier of mak­ing olive oil,” Mangialasche said.

“They even protested against it, as they were used to olives processed at higher tem­per­a­tures with tra­di­tional crush­ing means; they were used to a plain olive oil which was always the same across the years, devoid of any strong fla­vor,” she added.

“Intense taste, the bit­ter and the piquant notes, were seen by some pro­duc­ers as intru­sive; they were not under­stood at first,” Mangialasche con­tin­ued.

While most millers have aban­doned stone grinders and old-fash­ioned presses in the last few decades, the new funds aim to install state-of-the-art tech­nolo­gies to boost prod­uct qual­ity and a cir­cu­lar econ­omy.

Public fund­ing will sus­tain 40 to 50 per­cent of the invest­ment needed to upgrade older machin­ery.

Current crush­ing equip­ment is expected to be replaced with rotary disks and blade crush­ing equip­ment to enhance the pro­cess­ing speed and the product’s final qual­ity.

Advanced knead­ers capa­ble of min­i­miz­ing the pres­ence of oxy­gen in the process and keep­ing tem­per­a­tures down will be funded. This equip­ment reduces oxi­da­tion while max­i­miz­ing the amount of antiox­i­dants in the final prod­uct.

Other fund­ing will go to installing decanters capa­ble of sep­a­rat­ing the dif­fer­ent parts of the fruits in a sin­gle process. This is a cru­cial step for enhanc­ing extra vir­gin olive oil​’s phe­no­lic con­tent and enabling the cor­rect man­age­ment of pro­duc­tion byprod­ucts.

While pro­mot­ing the two-phase mills, funds will also go to the most mod­ern ver­sions of the three-phase milling processes.

“Three phases were the default 10 years ago, but it requires adding warm water to the process, which neg­a­tively impacts extra vir­gin olive oil qual­ity,” Mangialasche said. ​“Warm water washes away those phe­nols and antiox­i­dants which are the sources of piquant and bit­ter­ness, which is why many are used to plain olive oils.”

“That process also pro­duces pomace and waste water which require fur­ther pro­cess­ing and might impact the envi­ron­ment,” she added.

Mangialasche noted how mod­ern two-phase extrac­tors can reduce waste to zero. In processes where no warm water is added, extra vir­gin olive oil qual­ity is enhanced, and bio-digesters trans­form the remains into mate­r­ial for energy pro­duc­tion, cos­met­ics, ani­mal feed and more.

“One of the cus­tom addi­tions they intro­duced in their mill, such as the ultra­sound tech­nol­ogy, has attracted our atten­tion and became one of the rea­sons we chose to work with them,” Stefano Zenezini, co-owner of Cultura Viva, told Olive Oil Times in a June inter­view.

Il Nocciolino deployed the tech­nol­ogy – tested by researchers from the University of Perugia – in 2017, a first for extra vir­gin olive oil pro­duc­tion, accord­ing to Mangialasche.

“That ultra­sound tech­nol­ogy uses micro­scopic and mechanic action to instantly do what a tra­di­tional knead­ing process might take dozens of min­utes to fin­ish,” Mangialasche said.

A tra­di­tional kneader is a tank whose blades slowly stir the olive paste at a set tem­per­a­ture. The process breaks up the water-oil emul­sions cre­ated by crush­ing the olives. This gen­er­ates more sig­nif­i­cant drops of olive oil sep­a­rate from the water and fruit.

“When the ultra­sound tech­nol­ogy we imple­mented is used, knead­ers mostly serve as a means to pass the paste to the decanter,” Mangialasche said.

By sig­nif­i­cantly reduc­ing oper­at­ing times and tem­per­a­tures and min­i­miz­ing the con­tact of the olive paste with oxy­gen, mills using ultra­sound tech­nol­ogy are believed to sig­nif­i­cantly enhance extra vir­gin olive oil’s healthy com­po­nents and fla­vors.

Ultrasound tech­nol­ogy, like the other parts of the milling process, rep­re­sents an option avail­able to cus­tomers, depend­ing on their needs and spec­i­fi­ca­tions.

“Ultrasound might greatly help to mill early har­vested olives, as it helps to increase the final yield. The ultra­sound appa­ra­tus might even be turned off with fully ripened olives,” Mangialasche said.

“Traditional knead­ing is there­fore still an option, as adapt­ing to dif­fer­ent goals, dif­fer­ent olives and cus­tomers, all of that is rel­e­vant in the search for milling qual­ity,” she added.

While tech­nol­ogy is cru­cial, extra vir­gin olive oil qual­ity also depends on the olive har­vest­ing pro­ce­dures and the cor­rect pro­cess­ing times.

“The quicker, the bet­ter. As we work for third par­ties, we care­fully plan our sched­ule to ensure our cus­tomers quick, swift oper­a­tions,” Mangialasche said. ​“Proper sched­ul­ing is prob­a­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant step that results in a qual­ity prod­uct in a cut­ting-edge mill plant. You have to accom­mo­date large quan­ti­ties as well as smaller ones.”

“Volumes vary, depend­ing on the sea­son, how fruit­ful it was, or by the cus­tomers, whether they intend to process each dif­fer­ent cul­ti­var’s fruits in sin­gu­lar batches, which also means dif­fer­ent pro­cess­ing times, dif­fer­ent set­tings and so forth,” she added.

A cir­cu­lar econ­omy approach that aims to reuse waste and the deploy­ment of greener energy sources for the olive oil mills is at the core of the new pub­lic fund­ing round.

“Olive oil is an Italian flag­ship pro­duc­tion that must be defended and sup­ported at all lev­els. Innovation in olive oil is cru­cial to the fur­ther enhance­ment of prod­uct qual­ity and to the reduc­tion of the envi­ron­men­tal impact,” said Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida while announc­ing the fund­ing.

• Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forestry