Our Global Partnerships

Everyone’s aware of the droughts in California, at least they should be, but have you ever heard of a frost event? When it comes to agriculture, weather is everything, and boy is it temperamental, especially with this ever-changing climate (more on that later). A frost event basically means that in the early months of the year, if our trees are awake and starting to push buds, and then temperature drops below 25 degrees Fahrenheit our crop will be severely impacted.

An unexpected frost hit our ranches in Northern California during harvest 2018, and left us less than a third of the oil we needed for the year. Because we’ve lived in the state long enough to understand the highs and lows (and prepare as best as we can), we had already begun planting seeds globally to ensure we could still provide the highest quality oil to our consumers.

Photo Above: Our ranches in Chico, CA

Going Global

Buying olive oil globally can be incredibly transactional and mostly done through third parties. That's not how we wanted to do it. Relationships are everything to us at California Olive Ranch. The relationships with our employees, our grower partners, our consumers are critical to our success. We had proved this model could work under our Lucini brand, where we partner with select growers & millers in Italy to produce that award-winning line.

When we went global on the California Olive Ranch brand, we wanted to build the types of relationships we have here in the United States. We wanted partners who grew olives in the unique way we did in California, and who shared our values. And we wanted to work with them directly - which is different from how other olive oil companies do it. Little did we know, we’d learn how to become an even closer family by bringing our relationships long distance. Frequent visits from our California team to our new global partners in Argentina, Portugal, and Chile lent itself to not only a cultural exchange, but a cross pollination of information and learnings.

Photo Above: Our partner ranches in Argentina

By treating these new grower partners like family, we were able to inspire them to try out and ultimately transform their farms into the high quality olive bearing ranches we had back home. We now had created a study abroad program without even trying, we brought our partners to our farms in Chico, CA allowed them to immerse themselves in our processes and relay those learnings back to Argentina.

The relationship between our global partners has completely transformed our company and team, we now have 3 different global products, Mild, Medium, and Robust that meet the high standards that we hold ourselves to here in California.

On top of that, we’re incredibly proud that our 100% California product is back and better than ever. Our inspiring and resilient team has worked tirelessly to bring back our tried and true product, while along the way, expanding our family and product offerings. This is one long distance relationship we’d like to be a part of for a very long time.