Olive oil is an essential part of the human diet worldwide. The olive industry is a challenging blend of time-honoured growing traditions and personal touch mixed with advanced technology. Alfa Laval provides The Olive Place with innovative equipment to help ensure a consistent, reliable oil quality.

Getting the best out of New Zealand Olives

Alfa Laval has more than seventy years of experience in separator technology and the plant at The Olive Place’s Northland New Zealand Olive Oil production facility, helps us to automate some of the following:

• Washing
• Crushing
• Malaxing
• Centrifuging
• Separation
• Extraction
• Efficient, flexible and reliable

The Alfa Laval machinery in use at The Olive Place is standard technology that’s used across the global olive oil industry.

The direct benefit is that we are able to rely on the company’s vast engineering experience.  In turn, this means we are able to provide you, the grower with maximum efficiency, flexibility and reliability to meet virtually any production volume and any configuration needed to achieve the desired balance between yield and quality.

We would be delighted to show you around. If you would like to tour our facilities, please get in touch to arrange an appointment.

Contract Processing

We have been contract processing olives using our Alfa Laval press since 2007, for growers from as far away as Whakatane to the South and Kaikohe to the North. It is a two-phase process, meaning no water is added to your olives, which produces superior quality olive oil with a higher content of antioxidants.

This state-of-the-art press incorporates Vertical Centrifuge to remove the final sediment and moisture, a key factor in ensuring a longer shelf life. Our clients regularly win awards and recently we helped a few reach Best of Show at the Olive New Zealand and Olivetti Awards. We have Near Infrared analysis equipment to assist growers to achieve the best results.

The Olive Place has always been very flexible, and accepts batches of olive fruit as small as 9kg and up to 20 tonnes there is no minimum quantity required. It is preferable that you book at least a week in advance as we are very popular during the processing season.

We have a limited number of ventilated crates (small 10kg, large approx 300kg) available for use at a nominal charge rate. We can also provide a contract bottling service.

Arguably one of the most important steps in the process of turning olives into award winning olive oil, is the bottling.

At The Olive Place, the newest addition to our comprehensive facility, is a complete filling line, including a capping and labelling machine. This has taken our overall capability to the next level.

The Olive Place Bottling Plant

An end-to-end facility

Not all bottles are created equally!  Manually filling bottles is a slow and inaccurate process. The ability to automate filling bottles by weight or exact volume cannot be underestimated.

Our new automated plant, purchased in 2014, enables us to deliver a precise quantity of oil into each bottle, meaning the volume will now always be consistent. Since this is automated, the time taken to carry out this process is drastically reduced resulting in a lower overall production cost.

The Olive Place’s new bottling facility has been custom-designed to meet our specifications and complements the rest of our processing equipment perfectly. This means that we are now able to offer a true end-to-end service to our olive growing clients.

• Pressing Of Olives
• Bottling the Olive Oil
• Labelling & packaging

How it works

During the process, the bottles are first flushed with Argon, a naturally occurring, environmentally friendly inert gas. Next, a piston draws up a calibrated amount of oil, then injects it into the bottle. Both weight and volume are adjusted for temperature, as a given amount of oil will fill a greater volume at a higher temperature.

Finally, prior to capping, a small amount of Argon is added to the top of the bottle to squeeze out any remaining oxygen which helps to form a protective blanket on the liquid surface to preserve aromas and flavours.

Labelling and laser printing, followed by packing completes the process.

We would be delighted to show you around. If you would like to tour our facilities, please get in touch to arrange an appointment.