friend,

In every corner of the world, Farm2Me brand founders are bringing change home to their communities. but not all changemakers are created equal

From working to restore human rights to forming sustainable olive oil supply chains, we’re inspired by these changemakers who are using their expertise and lived experiences to bring about positive change. but we also don’t like it when they rip you off w/ greenwashed product. that’s what this episode is about.

We think you’ll find these founders pretty inspiring too, so please, read on to learn about Temecula Olive Oil, Texas 1836, Grove 45, Brightland, and Graza, and find more stories like these on Farm2.me.

With warm regards, Farm2Me

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1836 A Texas Olive Oil Company's owner and producer Kerry Thornhill's dream of building an olive orchard began in 2012 with a desire to pay homage to her maternal grandparents, LR (Polo) and Consuelo Vasquez, and 1836 A Texas Olive Oil Company decades of support to Asherton and its community. 1836 A Texas Olive Oil Company orchard’s first commercial production of extra virgin olive oil was harvested in Fall 2016 and bottled as 1836: A TEXAS OLIVE COMPANY. In March of 2017, 1836:A Texas Olive Company made its debut on the shelves of Bering’s in Houston, and since then 1836:A Texas Olive Company has grown to include a retail presence at gourmet shops throughout the Houston, Austin, Dallas, Marfa and Central Texas areas.

Grab yourself a bottle of 1836:A Texas Olive Company and support small batch olive oil production in Texas.

Made in Asherton, TX

Founded by Kerry Thornhill in 2016

Grove 45 is Extra Virgin Olive Oil and is a long-time Napa Valley staple, producing exceptional premium Extra Virgin Olive Oil from proprietary Grove 45 olive groves located in Chiles Valley and Saint Helena, CA.

Made in Chiles Valley and Saint Helena, CA

Founded by Bonnie Storm in 2009

Brightland Olive Oil carefully source their olives from family-run California farms, then craft them into custom-blended oils. Brightland Olive Oil’s sole ingredient comes from trees that live on for thousands of years; so you can rest assured that what you’re putting into your body is straight from the earth. It’s grounded. It’s good for you. It’s never seen a lab.

Brightland Olive Oil’s fruit-forward vinegars are made on a nutrient-dense, family-run farm in California’s Central Coast. Chardonnay and Zinfandel grapes, Navel and Valencia oranges, and ripe Triple Crown blackberries are grown in nutrient-dense soil, selected with care, and double fermented in stainless steel. You’ll taste the process on your palate – zingy and bright, bold and decadent.

The “Central Coast” isn’t a olive ranch, so we say Brightland is the least transparent of the Olive Oils in our network – though they organised a collection of olive growers in central coast to buy from. I would keep this close to your heart as they grow and so will we — just to make sure they don’t grown beyond their means and turn to mass producers to fill the demand.

Made in California’s Central Coast

Founded by Aishwarya Iyer in 2018

How to read the label on $30 Olive Oil

Olive oil is the new fancy kid. But ever wonder what makes the difference in a high end olive oil? (Don’t get greenwashed)

There are two types of shoppers in 2024.

One is on social finding brands through popularity, reaching for recognizable squeeze bottles or fancy glassware labels. The other is wondering why these bottles are better when they’re $40 and found at every grocery and specialty store in the country. We’re on the latter side!

That’s right! It’s impossible for an olive oil to be in every grocery store in the country and be a quality product, unless they tell you the 1,000s of small batch farms each bottle is bottled in — otherwise it’s mass produced, consolidated, handled by multiple drivers, packers, unpackers, bottlers, producers, might even travel long distances between the farm, distributor, bottler, warehouse, and the grocery stores, or worse — processed, over processed, made of cheap olive, lin large batches, and upsold to you with enormous margins (think: $5 olive oil for $20 or $10 olive oil for $40.

Whichever one you are, you’ve probably seen some fancy terms thrown around to get people part with their money. Cold pressed and extra virgin. Early harvest, late harvest. High polyphenol count. High on bio-available antioxidants…

We run through the most important terms you’ll find olive oil labels and why they matter.

There’s a brutal thunderstorm ripping through CT right now, so hope you’re just sitting around for something to read like us.

What matters on a label

Let’s start with the basics. Olive oil without any of the other labels simply refers to oil that has been extracted from the olive fruit. This doesn’t tell you much about how the oil was extracted or the quality. More on that later.

In general, the tell of a high-quality bottle of olive oil is the amount of information you’ll find on the label. As with wines or coffees, quantity is an indication of quality when it comes to the amount of details the producer is bothered to add. One could even say…. more is more. Think: can you google a farm name or is it just a city, state or country? You need to know the farmer(s) so you can google them and see their reviews / audits online — better yet, visit them when you’re in town. 🙃

Origin, Freshness, and Bottling

Olive oil is mainly a mediterranean thing, with Spain, Greece, and Italy being the top producers, followed by other countries in Southern Europe & North Africa, like Tunisia, Portugal, and Turkey. Most of the production in the US is from California, Texas, or Georgia – which is now producing some great olive oils. We at Farm2Me sell Spanish Olive Oil in Spain, Greek Olive Oil in Greece, and American in America. Why? Because you can buy it here, and it’s better for the environment. Also, we limit which Olive Oil “makers” we sell… you won’t find mass produced non-transparent olive oil here. Not just because we want to stop you, but rather we want you to be able to know the difference – the choice to choose rather than being forced into a black hole of a market without any choice from mass produced $40 bottles. Read on…

In general, smaller productions produce better quality than big industrial producers and single origin brings more character to the taste of an oil than blends simply by the fact that it is specific to a region or producer. For example, oils from Spain tend to be larger production (they’re one of the biggest mass producer regions in the world), oils from Italy are known to have a grassier taste, and oils from Greece often have a peppery undertone (think dry sun heat causing the olives to be stronger in taste).

You also want to check the bottle for a best by date – while olive oil holds pretty well, anything with a use by date over 18 months of bottling should raise a brow.

These are not the most important things to look at — but good to know.

Harvest Time

Around the mediterranean, harvesting can happen anytime between October (early) and February (late) and then they were harvested matters for a lot of things.

Early harvest (Oct-Nov) tends to give smaller yields using less ripe olives. These olives are not fully ripened, so they are still green or starting to change color. The flavor is more intense – the pepperiness or grassy-ness is more intense, it tends to be more bitter, and in general has a more complex flavor profile. They are also known to have more of the healthy-stuff – antioxidants and popolyphenols.

Late harvest (Dec-Feb) tends to be milder, fruitier, and smoother. It can have slighly lower polyphenol count because the olives were more ripe when they were harvested but it still maintains a lot of the health benefits for olive oil in general.

Again, this is more fact that how to identify the difference in small batch quality.

How it was Manufacturered

Most of the terms we’re used to seeing on labels refers to how the oil was manufactured. Phrases like Cold Pressed, First Pressed, Extra Virgin all refer to how the oil was extracted and at which temperatures.

The amount of processing matters because the things that manufacturers do to prolong shelf life – heating, filtering, adding chemicals – also ruins the quality of the olive oil by removing a lot of the flavor and reducing the health benefits. The more it is processed, the more it is stripped of the good stuff and left with the bad stuff. Boo! We want it to be Cold Pressed and we want it to be Extra Virgin.

Temecula Olive Oil still stone grinds the olives – think like 2 disks of stone grinding on top of each other. Hand cranked. You’ll taste the difference — don’t need more than a few drops to get the flavor in your salad — and you don’t cook with these olive oils (unless you’re a billionaire, and in any case you would ruin the flavour once heated).

The Characteristics of the Oil

When we start getting fancy, we’ll also see some claims about the specific characteristics of the oil itself, which of course is a direct result of everything we’ve talked about so far.

So this is hard to explain – have you ever tasted olive oil and thought this tastes too much like olives? Yeah, that’s a cheap olive oil. Sorry, just because it’s $40 doesn’t make it good. What I’m trying to say is that good quality, small batch olive oil like Grove 45 in CA or 1836 Texas Olive Oil in TX could be poured like a shot and you can drizzle some honey and lemon in it and it would taste like something spectacular! That’s olive oil. And that’s all you need, a little drizzle on your pizza or salad, it will last years on your counter, and you’ll thank us! Your customers (if you’re running a store or restaurant) will be back again – and no store will be able to beat you.

Let’s start with flavor intensity. As you can imagine by now, high intensity means you’ll taste a lot more of the oil in your dishes. It’s not inherently good or bad, since it depends on the quality of the taste (paragraph before this) and what you like or the dish you’re using it for. High intensity great tasting olive oil works for drizzling over salads, grilled vegetables, and dishes where a strong olive oil presence is a good thing, or taking a shot. For more subtle dishes, you might want to go for an oil with lower intensity.

Next, there’s acidity level. For this one, there is a good and a bad and lower is better. Acidity in this case is talking about the relative amount of free fatty acids in the oil, since these fatty acids are what we’re talking about when we say there are “healthy fats” in olive oil. In poor quality olive oil, more of the fatty acids have been broken down. This is the equivalent of health benefit — sorry grocery store Olive Oil. Yes, even Whole Foods, Trader Joes, Faire, etc.

Then there’s polyphenol count and antioxidants. Polyphenols are a by product of photosynthesis in plants that are known to be antioxidants, meaning they reduce the risk of heart disease and a long list of other diseases by neutralizing free radicals in the body. A high-polyphenol count is a good thing.

What Does Cold-Pressed Olive Really Mean?

The cold-pressed label means the oil was mechanically extracted from the olives at temperatures that don’t rise above 80.6 F. Low heat means the oil stays unaltered and remains high quality. Think machines going up and down really fast creating heat, or grinders working like an engine. Not good!

The Origin of the Term

Modern olive oil extraction doesn’t look like the process from hundreds of years ago. Back then, olives were crushed by stones and the mushy goodness was then spread on mats. Here, the olive water and oil would be separated through a manual pressing process. 

Machinery has since developed and most “pressing” is done with technology like the centrifuge, a high-speed spinning device that separates liquids based on their density. Think of it like being in the Disneyland teacup ride at 10x speed where the “olive water” teacups fly to one corner and the “oil” ones glide to the opposite side. You don’t want that!

So think no mass production — no mass production regions in Spain like Jaen, Spain. Graza olive oil (which never called Farm2Me back to be transparent about their olive oil production — since 2021) Graza is made in Jaen, Spain, a region that produces more than half of the world’s olive oil. So yes, Graza promises a high quality at low $20 price point, but it’s actually not 🤮. Ask yourself how they can make enough Olive Oil to sell 10s of cases to every grocery store in the country, if it’s high quality?

Save your money , and refill that bottle with Bartoli or some other crap. If you want something to drizzle or sizzle – go with another olive oil or learn about them on Farm2Me.

First Pressed

So how is cold pressed different from first pressed? The first “pressed” label also refers to the old method of extraction. Olives would be pressed multiple times to get as much oil as possible. The first press was considered the best quality while any subsequent pressings were seen as “inferior” oil. 

Because this term applies to the first batch of extraction, this also means the olives are pressed while cold. So an olive oil labeled as the first press is almost always cold-pressed.

EVOO

Now, let’s discuss how these labels apply to extra virgin olive oil. By definition, and based on international oil regulations, olive oil can only earn the title of “virgin” or “extra virgin” if it is cold-pressed. This means all extra virgin olive oil, regardless of whether it slaps it on its label or not, is cold-pressed. 

For the most part, extra virgin olive oil is always first, cold pressed to achieve the best quality standards. This doesn’t apply if you buy a bottle with “virgin,” “refined,” or “blend” on the label. Those may have been pressed multiple times or with heat and are of a lower quality.

Health Benefits of Cold-Pressed Olive Oil

The labels might not mean anything, but the benefits of cold-pressed (aka extra virgin) olive oil have evidence to back them up. 

EVOO is mostly made up of healthy, unsaturated fats –75% by volume– and packed with antioxidants. Together, these two powerhouses support the immune system, reduce inflammation, and boost brain health. Who doesn’t want a stronger mind and cleaner body?

There’s also growing research that cold-pressed, extra virgin olive oils can:

• Promote healthy hair, skin, and nails

• Lower blood sugar levels

• Reduce the development of osteoporosis

• Decrease the likelihood of type 2 diabetes

You can enjoy a similar ratio of unsaturated fats in regular olive oil as well, but some experiments have shown that oils processed with high heat or chemicals contain fewer antioxidants. For the best options, you want to stay away from olive oil blends which have been mixed with other suspicious oils and light olive oil which is ultra processed.

65+ other changemakers

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