Oro Bailén: Pure Gold in a Sea of Olives

“People often ask me whether I sleep at home or here at the olive oil mill. I cer­tainly sleep at home, but when you really like what you are doing it doesn’t feel like work,” says José Gálvez, man­ager of Oro Bailén.

Those extra hours and ded­i­ca­tion may have well paid off as his com­pany, which started pro­duc­ing olive oil in 2005, is regarded as one of the best-estab­lished olive oil pro­duc­ers in Jaén.

In 2019, they won a Best in Class Award, two Gold Awards and one Silver at the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition.

A per­for­mance that fol­lows a con­tin­u­ous path of awards that started in 2014.

Placed at the foothills of the south side of Sierra Morena, the nat­ural bor­der between the plains of La Mancha and Andalusia, in Southern Spain, Oro Bailén’s olive groves and olive mill lie within the lim­its of the so-called Sea of Olives.

“We are sur­rounded by over 60 mil­lion olive trees. Jaén is the largest olive oil pro­ducer in the world. More than 20 per­cent of the global pro­duc­tion comes from this province,” Gálvez proudly says as he shows Olive Oil Times his mill.

It’s mid-January and both the mill and the recep­tion area for the olives have are already been cleaned.

While some pro­duc­ers are still in the last days of the har­vest sea­son — which this year has been par­tic­u­larly short in Andalusia — Oro Bailén’s cam­paign has been over for almost two months already.

“One of our most remark­able traits is that 80 per­cent of the oils we make are early-har­vest oils. Our oils are har­vested from mid-October to mid-November, leav­ing some 20 per­cent until the end of November for riper oils which may also serve cus­tomers for other cook­ing pur­poses,” Gálvez explains.

For decades, the Gálvez fam­ily was ded­i­cated to the pro­duc­tion of bricks for con­struc­tion, a tra­di­tional sec­tor in their home­town of Bailén.

At one point, José’s father decided to diver­sify their activ­ity by invest­ing in olive groves and olive oil pro­duc­tion.

“Being in a province with such a large olive oil pro­duc­tion, where fam­i­lies have been pro­duc­ing olive oil for gen­er­a­tions, our busi­ness strat­egy was based on doing some­thing dif­fer­ent to what was being done,” he recalls.

Early-har­vest olive oils are now regarded as the best in terms of health and organolep­tic qual­ity.

However, just a few years ago, Gálvez points out, things were dif­fer­ent.

“When we started 15 years ago, it really was a chal­lenge and, more than a chal­lenge, a bet. To start pro­duc­ing oil by mid-October was some­thing pretty risky at the begin­ning. Productivity is much lower and, back then, we didn’t know the mar­ket and how the consumer’s reac­tion was going to look like,” he says.

Nowadays, Oro Bailén’s oils come from some 2,000 hectares of olive groves and its pro­duc­tion has been steadily grow­ing through­out the years.

“We export to 38 coun­tries around the world and we pride our­selves on main­tain­ing the qual­ity of our olive oil every year. I want a bot­tle of Oro Bailén to have the same qual­ity no mat­ter the year and regard­less of where you open it,” Gálvez tells.

“But early har­vest oils have a very tight dead­line when it comes to har­vest and pro­duc­tion. So, if you want to keep your qual­ity, you can’t extend that dead­line. Instead, you have to har­vest more amount of olives and to pro­duce more oil in the same period of time. That’s very impor­tant. We have been increas­ing our capa­bil­i­ties of har­vest and pro­duc­tion accord­ing to the growth of our demand,” he adds.

As we stroll among the olive trees, Gálvez points the weeds grow­ing among them and the shred­ded prun­ing mate­ri­als on the ground.

Oro Bailén’s olive groves fol­low the prin­ci­ples of the inte­grated farm­ing sys­tem which, accord­ing to the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, aims at long-term sus­tain­able pro­duc­tion using care­fully selected and con­trolled bio­log­i­cal and chem­i­cal meth­ods in order to make envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion and farm­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity com­pat­i­ble.

“It is halfway, or a bal­anced way, between envi­ron­men­tal respect and farm­ing prof­itabil­ity. We don’t till our olive groves, which pre­vents the ero­sion of the soil. We don’t use her­bi­cides. For us, weeds don’t com­pete with olive trees,” Gálvez sug­gests.

When asked about ​“the secret” to main­tain­ing a high-qual­ity stan­dard through­out the years, Gálvez laughs. It’s not the first time he’s got that ques­tion.

“Every time we grow, we must opti­mize every sin­gle process accord­ing to the growth we are expe­ri­enc­ing. If we are talk­ing about staff, we are talk­ing about train­ing that staff. Involving that staff on our project (…). They have to under­stand what we are doing,” he assures.

“And it’s basi­cally believ­ing in what you are doing (…). You get hooked to this sec­tor once you start doing things and you see a hint of grat­i­tude or recog­ni­tion. That slap on the back may look so cliché: ​‘What do awards mean to you?’ ​‘Oh, it’s a slap in the back to what we are doing…’. That’s what it really is.”