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olive oil

August 29, 2018

Do you Really Need a Smart Olive Oil Bottle? You may Actually Want Olivery’s

As I explain what the Olivery (pronounced like delivery) does, you will be tempted to scoff and stop reading. But power through that response because, on the surface anyway, Olivery sounds kinda neat.

Now in the middle of its Kickstarter campaign, the Olivery is a “smart” olive oil bottle and refill system. (This is where you’ll want to stop reading because, “ugh” another smart device — but keep going!). The bottle itself is made from a special kind of glass that helps the olive oil stay fresh for longer. From the campaign page:

Our smart bottle is made from Violettglass, a special type of light reflecting glass for a very good reason. Our friends at the engineering agency Miron in Switzerland did research into the behaviour of light in glass and it’s effect on the contents inside. They concluded that not all colours of the light spectrum cause fruit and veg to oxidise and, in fact, violet and infrared slow down the aging process. So Miron have helped us create a bottle that blocks all colours except these two. This special black glass means your Olivery oil stays perfect for up to six months.

If true, that’s pretty cool. Glad you kept reading? The bottle also has an LED lit base that tells you when you are running low on olive oil. Once you’ve used up 80 percent of the oil, a chip in the bottle talks via Bluetooth to the oLi mobile app on your phone that lets you order more. OK, so that’s not that new, there are plenty of companies working on auto-refilling — but what is interesting is how Olivery ships its refills.

Instead of sending you a whole new bottle, Olivery sells replacement olive oil in small plastic pouches that lay flat in a small box which can fit through a mail slot for easy shipping. Once you receive it, just pour the pouch into your Olivery bottle and you’re back in business.

As for the quality of the oil, Olivery says: “Our extra virgin olive oil is made from cold pressed olives in Puglia in the South Italy. In the middle of Puglia, you’ll find the Gargano National Park, a protected nature reserve of great beauty.”

The folks behind Olivery are looking to raise $40,865 to fully fund its campaign and produce the first 1,000 bottles. Early backers can get get a starter kit that includes the bottle and 500 ml refill of oil for €49 (~$57). Refill packs will cost roughly $12 USD. Though the campaign says it will ship anywhere in the world, the Olivery people told me that they are shipping to Europe the U.S., and Canada.

Olive oil may seem like a pretty niche market for such an intricate and “smart” system, but this actually the second startup we’ve written about in the past three months that wants to improve your olive oil experience. Earlier this summer, the Israeli-based Olive X-Press fully funded its own campaign for a countertop olive oil press. The company behind the X-Press claims that the market for olive oil globally is $10 billion.

Olive oil costs roughly $20 a bottle for something that will last you a few weeks if not a couple months. So ponying up $60 for an olive oil bottle may seem pretty steep. But if the oil is good and the shipping cost doesn’t add too much to the $12 refill, the Olivery might be actually useful, and nothing to scoff at.

June 1, 2018

Countertop Olive Oil Cold Press Hits Crowdfunding Goal

Buying olive oil seems to be fraught with more danger than it needs to be. You have to consider which type you get, where it’s from, why something can be “extra” virgin, how it was pressed, and how long it was sitting on the store shelf — and that’s all before it gets into your home where you have to be careful where you store it and for how long.

I just want to dunk my bread in something delicious.

A new company out of Israel is looking to change all that hubbub by bringing fresh olive oil to your countertop. The Olive X-Press is roughly the size of a blender and uses a cold press to turn 3 kilograms (6.61 lbs) of olives into 500 CCs (16 fl. oz.) of olive oil in roughly 45 minutes. While still in the prototype stage, the Olive X-Press is now fully funded, having raised $386,000 on the Israeli investor platform ExitValley. This money is in addition to a $1.5 million early seed investment.

According to supporting investment materials on the Olive X-Press’ investment page, the global olive oil market is $10 billion, which is mostly supermarkets. The problem is that olives have a very short harvest window, and an even shorter shelf-life so the oil you buy at the store year round has probably already begun degrading. To extend the olives’ shelf-life, the company has come up with Olive X-Tend, an organic treatment (no more details on that) and vacuum seals them so they last for more than a year.

Once at market, Olive X-Press plans to make money through a combination of device sales to the consumer and small businesses (delis, grocers, etc.), as well as a subscription service to get fresh olives delivered to your doorstep. The target price point for the Olive X-Press is $299, with bags of 3kg olives costing $7 -- $10 each. The company holds three patents for the device, and plans to go into commercial production of the home machine in 2019. They’ll follow that up six months later with a larger scale machine for supermarkets.

Olive X-Press Demo

“Fresh” is a hot buzzword right now as new technology enables the production of certain food items to move further away from centralized factories and closer to our homes. You can see this in the coffee world with the recent launches of the Bellwether and Carbine Coffee ventless, electric roasters. These appliances are built so smaller establishments like cafés and bakeries can roast their own coffee beans on-site, to provide maximum freshness and flavor for their customers. And like those endeavors, it seems like the Olive X-Press could find a market in restaurants and cafés looking for higher quality ingredients and a little differentiation.

But the home market is another story. For consumers, the Olive X-Press is more akin to the Bonaverde Berlin, the countertop machine that roasts, grinds and brews coffee. Both are single-use machines that take a long time to create the finished product, and both manufacturers want to sell you the inputs (green coffee beans, raw olives).

This could just be my lazy American bias showing, but while I’m sure fresh olive oil tastes much better, my hunch is that I’d rather just grab a bottle of it from the store, despite all the danger.

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