Shawn's Blog

Last week, we were milling some Mission and Manzanillo fruit with Blood Oranges as we are now done making extra virgin olive oil. This process reminded me that last November, Curtis Cord wrote in Olive Oil Times what I thought was a very good piece about flavored oils. The gist of it was that flavored olive oil should not be labeled as extra virgin. I think he may have taken it a bit far saying it should not be labeled as olive oil at all as the percentage of the flavored oil that is flavoring falls in the low single...

I had visions of writing several posts during milling season documenting the progression of the season, perhaps photos of the same variety of fruit coming in several weeks apart and also giving the differences in yields we saw as this transpired. Then I had hoped to have bucolic photos of our crop coming in on beautiful fall days, harvest crews in the background and so on. The reasons this did not happen are threefold. First and foremost, milling season didn't really happen this year. As has been pretty well documented in my blog and elsewhere, the crop was extremely light...

My last post briefly described SHD production and alluded to the competitive difficulties this method of production creates for both traditional and small SHD growers. In order for SHD production to work, it needs to be done on a relatively large scale: the cost of bringing in or owning the equipment is sufficiently high that if you are not farming sizable acreage, there is no cost effectiveness to the mechanization. This means that the typical SHD operation is better capitalized and more efficient than the typical small producer. That makes for a pretty tough competitor. I was recently asked to...

  I frequently find myself in conversations about how the olive oil industry is doing and usually reference SHD production and get blank looks. SHD is Super High Density production and I am surprised how many people tangentially involved in the industry still don't know either what it is nor how important it is to the success of domestic olive oil production.   SHD production was really driven in the U.S. by California Olive Ranch (C.O.R.) soon after 2000. At the time there were many skeptics and C.O.R. operated with a very open format sharing what they were doing with...

I would like to explain a dramatic price increase that will occur over the next few months for many of the bottles we sell. This is not intended to be a partisan post nor a politicization of anything. I only hope to make clear something that I worry is not clear to many of our customers and to consumers in general. This is a post about tax policy and the effects of tariffs. The only reason I'm bringing it up is that the bottles we sell that are made in China just got hit with tariffs. Tariffs get charged to...