Shawn's Blog

It's been a wild ride!

Posted by Shawn Addison on

This spring and summer have brought several changes to The Olive Oil Source, including a new website.

Long ago and far away I was doing these blog posts pretty regularly, and then came mid-March 2020.  Covid 19 and all the chaos it brought with it really threw a wrench into the gears for us as I’m sure it did for just about every business out there.  It has been a remarkably time consuming event due to the uncertainties of what business was going to be like, incredibly varying levels of sales, fundamental changes in the way business was conducted, and of course the unavoidable regulatory elements that came with it. Almost six months into it, things have...

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Racking, Bottling and Labeling

Posted by Shawn Addison on

Things to think about before bottling your olive oil.

As we finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for milling this year, we also are starting to get deluged with requests for bottling. For those of you who have been through the drill repeatedly, you won't learn much from this and should probably spend your time elsewhere.  If this is your first time bottling, there are some important things you need to know. First, get your label squared away. The production of labels always takes much longer than one expects. There is always a lot of work to do on the design side, revisions to designs,...

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2019 Harvest and Milling

Posted by Shawn Addison on

The 2019 olive harvest and milling report.

I have not had time to write as it has been a crazy season of milling that is nowhere near finished. This brief holiday break gave me a chance to write a bit, however. At this point, it looks like we will continue to mill E.V.O.O. throughout all of January and, weather permitting, flavored oils in February. This year's harvest, as anticipated, was the largest we've seen in our area in the 16 years we have been milling commercially. Some of what I wrote in my pre-harvest post was accurate and some was not. Here is a recap. I had...

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It's That Time!

Posted by Shawn Addison on

It's time to get ready for olive harvest.

Harvest is upon us and since we have been in this business, I've never been so happy to have it happen.  I don't think our inventory has ever been this low at this time of year so we desperately need to get oil coming in. The size of the crop is quite large in our area and that is wonderful news. While we have seen the harvest move forward 2 - 3 days at a very steady rate over the last 10 years or so, this year's looks like it is going to be a little bit earlier than what used...

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What goes around!

Posted by Shawn Addison on

We are not supporters of tariffs (even when they benefit The Olive Oil Source).

Last October I wrote about the tariffs being imposed on glass and a multitude of other products and how those tariffs were assessed and paid. I presented them as evil terrible things. Ironically, yet another round of tariffs is being proposed that this time will be levied against imported olive oil. This is a huge boon to The Olive Oil Source as we have always focused on selling Californian olive oil. Now those lower priced imports we have had so much trouble competing against are going to get more expensive, possibly a lot more expensive. Does that make me a...

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