Shawn's Blog

One task I have that I wish I had more time for is getting out and talking to our customers. I enjoy seeing their olive oil stores, hearing what is and what is not working for them, and most of all, what new products they'd like to see. When The Olive Oil Source started, it was all about selling hard-to-find equipment for producing olive oil to the fledgling olive oil industry in California. Starting in about 2009, however, we began to get a lot of inquiries from tasting bars, gourmet shops, and private labelers to start offering a broader array of...

A big part of our business in the past has been providing equipment to small olive oil producers, essentially boutique operations. Small producers still make up the bulk of our equipment sales augmented with items for retail sales operations. A large part of my time these days is spent working in a consulting capacity for these smaller operations. This work involves everything from checking on olive orchards to helping with equipment decisions or facility layouts for olive oil producers as well as giving advice on setting up new retail operations. Last week I was helping a small producer with their...

There is a lot of literature out there on the right way to do things in this industry whether it is planting, pruning, harvesting, milling, storage, or any of a number of other aspects of the business. In a perfect world they sound great and are what we strive for, but we see and hear a lot from people taking those points a little too far. Sometimes the physical or economic realities of the situation simply don't allow you to do something the way it is described in a book. Pruning this year is a perfect example of that. Ideally we'd...

When I got into this business I had visions of sunset strolls through the orchard on warm summer evenings and enjoying a glass of wine or dining al fresco with a beautiful view over the orchard. It never occurred to me that as an added bonus I'd become a connoisseur of regulatory inspections. I referenced regulation in an earlier post and some of the numerous regulatory agencies and paperwork we have to deal with. Apparently that was a harbinger of things to come as 3 days later, we got a surprise inspection from the F.D.A., which is a somewhat infrequent...

John and Lisa Deane started The Olive Oil Source as a primarily informational site about olive oil and the olive oil industry. Today, many producers of olive oil in the U.S., my wife and I included, learned much of what they know about the industry by reading the immense amount of information the Deans posted. The site still has much of the information they posted, a lot of it updated and reorganized, and we still spend a substantial amount of time every day answering questions sent to us. This one just came in and I thought it was interesting. I was...