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The path of olive oil: from grove to bottle

How olives from the grove become oil in a bottle: harvest, crushing, malaxation, centrifuge and filter. Twelve steps from the tree to the salad on your table.

  1. 🌳 Olive grove — Traditional groves: 50–100 trees per hectare; super-intensive hedgerows: over 800 (IOC). About 90% of the crop goes to oil.
  2. 🧺 Olive harvest — In the Northern Hemisphere oil olives are picked from October to April; by hand, about 80 kg per picker per day.
  3. 🏭 Olive oil mill — PDO Kalamata: olives reach the mill within 24 h of picking; Sitia and Baena: within 48 h.
  4. ⚙️ Olive crushing — Olives are ground with their stones into a paste by millstones, hammer or disc crushers.
  5. 🌀 Malaxation — The paste is stirred slowly, most often for 30–40 min at 18–27 °C.
  6. ❄️ Cold pressing — In the EU, “cold extraction” may appear on the label only if the paste stayed below 27 °C.
  7. ⚙️ Decanter centrifuge — Over 80% of the world's ~12,000 mills use centrifuges; a three-phase decanter adds 40–60 L of warm water per 100 kg of olives.
  8. 🔄 Olive oil filtration — Removes sediment and water (IOC: moisture ≤ 0.2%); unfiltered oil can turn “fusty” in under 5 days.
  9. 🏷️ Extra virgin olive oil — Acidity ≤ 0.8%, peroxide value ≤ 20 meq O₂/kg, no taste defects (EU 2022/2104).
  10. 🍼 Bottle — EU retail packs hold at most 5 L; the label says to keep the oil away from light and heat.
  11. 🏪 Shop — By law the EU label shows the category, origin and storage conditions; a harvest year only if 100% of the oil is from one harvest.
  12. 🥗 Salad — For salad, extra virgin is used unheated in a dressing: 3 parts oil to 1 part wine vinegar plus a little Dijon mustard.

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