 Welcome to the Private Property Farming Podcast. My name is Mbali Mwaka and thank you so much for joining us on this Tuesday evening right now at eight o'clock. If you're catching us on our Facebook channels, thank you for subscribing and following us on all our platforms, social media channels rather not Facebook. But thank you so much for following us on Facebook, Instagram, on Twitter, as well as LinkedIn and also subscribing to our YouTube channel. It's always fantastic to see more and more subscribers, more and more people watching the Private Property Farming Podcast and all the other podcasts that we have right here under the Private Property Family Day, which we'll be discussing about Olive Oils. We had this guest last week but because of connection, you know, we couldn't quite hear her well and she's got so much information around Olive Oils, especially around agro-processing that we felt it necessary to have her onto the show once again, solo, so that we could ask all the questions with regards to olive oil farming, olive oil agro-processing, and how she just got into the industry, it's such a niche crop to be farming olives. And so before we get into tonight's show, I just want to mention a very, very important announcement here is that we actually have the Real Estate Industry Summit brought to you by Private Property in partnership with Apsa coming quite soon. So this is the Real Estate Industry Summit brought to you by Private Property in partnership with Apsa, which will be taking place on the 29th of October, 2021. So this is a wonderful opportunity to expand your real estate knowledge, your expertise, and here are some of the most influential players in the property sector. So if you have a passion for real estate, I believe that the summit is for you. The summit will be taking place virtually. So be sure to tune in on Facebook on the 29th of October from 9am to 1pm South African time. The link of the event is in the comment section and further details will also be available in the show description, or you can visit www.realestateindustriesummit.co.z. Once again www.realestateindustriesummit.co.z. So be sure to tune in on the 29th of October, 9 to 1, and all the details will be on that website. And so, yeah, this one is for you, all industry or real estate lovers out there. Please continue to support the private property channel as well. And another announcement is that we do have a competition running called Know Your Crop. This is under the farming podcast. And it's all about telling us about what crop you're growing and let us know one thing or two about your crop that could obviously fascinate us as the audience, or just enlighten us in terms of why you decided to farm or plant or grow that crop. And we have two competition winners today. I just want to quickly announce the name because it's very imperative that you comment on tonight's live for you to claim your prize. And of course, the prize is a 500 grand cash voucher that you will be walking away with should you be selected as the winner for the Know Your Crop campaign. So today's winners is Uzama Teetwa from Facebook. And we also have Sizz underscore Zwani from Twitter. So that is Zama Teetwa from Facebook and at Sizz underscore Zwani from Twitter. So for Zama as well as Sizz, please comment directly onto tonight's show and tell us something fascinating. You could just say great show. You could like, you could share this. And also maybe ask our guest a question. We love, love engagement onto the show. So maybe ask our guest a question about her business and what she does and what she grows and listen attentively to her business as well. So I think we have pretty much got the formalities out the way. I'm quite excited to bring Bianca Bousart onto the show. Let us welcome her. She is a director of Glen Pat's Cliff, Olive Agro Processing and her farm is based, I think in the Northern Cape, if I stand to be corrected, but she will let us know quite shortly. And she's here to tell us about Olive Agro Processing and her role within a company. Bianca, thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing? Hi, Barley. Thanks so much for having me back specifically after all of those horrible connection issues that I had last week. No, it's understandable. These things happen. Were you based in the Northern Cape? Was it not? No, we're in the Western Cape. We're in the small coastal town. Yeah, I think it was all, it was that whole small town notion that I thought we were in the Northern Cape. And I'm just thinking, olive oils might need some dry area or not. But yeah, in the Western Cape. So thank you once again for coming onto the show. You know, just to get straight into it as well. Maybe for those who missed the first segment where we had your father onto the show as well as yourself, maybe just explain to us what Glein-Babskröf does and what is your role within the company? Okay. So we are an olive and wedding estate. So I say the base and it's in still by in the Western Cape. And our primary focus is olive and olive production. So we've got olive orchards on the farm where we farm olives, harvest, priest, or actually extract olive oil ourselves and then also process other olives we use in other olive products. We have diversified into other areas of business as well. The farm, we benefit from a magnificent view of the Hoko River in Stolbein. And we decided that we needed to, well, capitalize on that in a way. So we also interested into accommodation on the farm as well as weddings and events. So we've got a wedding venue where we host as well. But the primary focus is olive. Yeah, I love this. Oh, sorry, I was before you get into your role. I love this whole value add that farmers are doing on their farms, you know, because farms are such beautiful places to be in. Very peaceful, beautiful scenery. And I've seen some farms in the Western Cape, gorgeous, gorgeous. And I like the fact that you've added this wedding venue into the mix. But, you know, without diverting, maybe just tell us, like you were saying, your role within Gleinbach Slurff. Sure. So we like to describe ourselves as a boutique estate stall, simply for the fact that we are not one of the bigger producers in the field. However, we like the feeling that boutique gives to the product that we produce because we focus on quite an esteemed product. So the business is family owned and family run. As I mentioned last time, it's mostly it's myself, my father, and as well as my mother, who's involved in the business. And we each got our own separate areas that we focus on. My father is the farmer and he makes sure and he's also the olive oil maker. And then we've got my mother, who's like the product developer and also quality control from every product perspective. And then it's myself basically doing everything else, from sales to marketing, to the branding journey, to developing new markets or creating demand, focusing on everything else really around building a business. Right. But before you join Gleinbach Slurff, Bianca, what were you doing before that? Because I remember asking or saying to your father in the previous podcast, you know, how did he manage to twist your arm into the farm? And you actually interjected by saying, oh, no, I'm the one that said, I want to be part of the farm. So what were you doing before? And what made you decide to join your family business? So my background is actually completely different. I came from the last place that I worked was one of the biggest e-commerce companies in South Africa and I was actually focusing on commercial effectiveness within that space. So a lot of it was focused on like commodity economics, understanding what our different revenue streams are, what our cost streams are, and how we can make our cost streams more efficient, as well as improve more on our revenue streams. So focusing mostly on retail specifically and fashion, but from the type of skill that I was very grateful actually, because the type of skills and the exposure that I got was very business focused and very commercial focused. And I feel that that's something that you can take into the industry. So it was a personal choice for me to move out of that space and move into farming and to do so many business. And there's a few reasons for that. So from a personal perspective, it's one I'm very grateful and humbled to be able to say this. It's my passion, not just the farming side and like obviously I love olive oil and I love what you can do with it and the just the opportunities that it offers. But I also love being part of the family business and building on something that was started by my folks really and then seeing how far we can take that. But then also for the lifestyle, I decided that I want to be able to have the flexibility and what I do and when I do it. The strange thing is that now I work harder than ever. I don't necessarily feel like work because it's for our own business and it's for our own purpose, which makes it so much better. And then also just I said this last time, I feel very lucky that it can be, but I see a lot of opportunity from a business perspective in this space. And I can zone in on that a little bit, but I actually made sure there's a governing body in olive oil called ESA Olive. And the chair of ESA Olive is Mr. Dick Wilkinson. And I attended a ceremony last week where he actually gave one of the speeches and he gave a whole bunch of stats around the olive oil industry in South Africa and just a bunch of drivers that he gave forward as a reason for us to motivate us to like they were a bunch of different growers there to say, you're in the right place, you're doing the right thing. So I don't have the status where I won't be able to give you all the exact numbers, but basically what he comes down to is in the last 20 years, olive oil consumption, specifically extra virgin olive oil consumption in the world has doubled. The expectation is that in the next 20 years, it is once again going to be doubled. There's something like five or seven trees being planted every hour across the world. People are moving into olive industry. And what that means is just quickly going on a side note, another big thing that's happening, two of the big producers in the world like traditionally big producers, Italy and Greece or Italy and Spain apologies. They are moving towards stricter regulation when it comes to extra virgin olive oil. So essentially they won't be able to sell anything with a wording of extra virgin or virgin on anything other than olive oil. So what we've traditionally seen in like South African market is we would import what we think is Spanish, Italian and olive oil, but it's usually blamed. It's got some form of other oil in it. So it's a cheaper thing for them to export, but we are unknowing consumers. So we think that we're getting a premium product. It's exported, it comes from Spain or it comes from Italy, so we buy it. And it also made it very difficult for local producers to be able to compete with those products because our costs are so high and we do pure extra virgin olive oil. So how do you compete with those type of producers? But now what's happening is they are moving towards stricter regulation and they won't be able to do that, which is a huge bonus for specifically if you think of South African olive oil. And then just going back to the fact that the demand is growing so much and that the expectation is that the demand is going to keep growing over the next 20 years. Is when it comes to olive oil production, when you produce it on mass, when you do bulk olive oil production, it becomes very difficult to do complex styles of olive oil. So I'm getting a little bit technical here, but basically what you'll then do is you'll produce a single variety of oil. So you'll have your varieties like your Mission or your Frontoio, or you don't really use Kalamata, I'm just thinking of Laos now, but you'll have a single variety of olive oil that you put that one variety through your praise and that's the oil that you're going to sell, because you need to be able, you, the market will, or the industry will want to keep up with the market. But the type of oils that South African producers make are complex premium style blended oil. So we use old school techniques to make a really high quality, well-balanced, delicious, like amazing olive oil product, but it takes time and it takes a lot of resource, you don't get as much out of it from a profit perspective as you do with just doing a single variety. But what that means is that the world is going to be a shortage in supply of this type of quality olive oil. So if you focus, I mean, you can go either way, it depends on the business model that you adapt, but either way, the story is good. There's, the demand is going to be there. What we want to know is will we be able to keep up with the demand from a local perspective? And yeah, basically just like hearing those type of stats and having that type of conversations again just confirmed for me again, the decision I made recently is that there's potential and there's something to focus on. So sorry, I went all the way around to give you just the bigger picture, but now you understand that it's a market with a whole lot of potential. And it's something that I think if there is anyone in South Africa looking to enter a new market from an agri-side, I shouldn't be telling competitors to join, but it's a good place to be. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for those stats in the background around olive oil because it's such a niche crop. You don't get to meet an olive farmer every day. And so it's quite great that you put it into perspective where we stand from a global aspect in terms of olive oil. Going back to Claim Baskerv and your role within the organization, you mentioned that processing specifically the Claim Baskerv brand. It is a premium brand. It requires a lot of resources and a lot of time. Maybe how long does it take from the growing side? So from primary production going to post, let's say that processing element, how long does it take to get a premium olive oil brand bottled from post harvest to pack house? Because you mentioned it's premium. It needs a decent amount of resources to make it premium and to taste good and to meet the standards. So how long does that processing value add take to make sure that at the end of the day you have a product that has still meets good quality standards, export ready or locally can be supplied locally and still meet consumer standards as well. So just going back to the very beginning. My father focused on this more last week when we were with you as well. Basically, if you plant an olive tree, you've got four or five years for what you can call like a harvest. The tree will start bearing fruit but it takes something like seven to almost eight years for it to have a full harvest where you get full yield from your tree. So that's your set up time initially to get to that point. But you can start harvesting around about five years. Then what you do is you run on a yearly cycle. So your trees will bear fruit once a year for you'll see in typically starts very standard to any edible plants or trees that we know. In September, you'll start with a little flowers on the tree which will then eventually blossom and grow into fruit which we then harvest around autumn next year. So we already harvested our olives between March and May this year and we're now starting to see our 2020-22 harvest already starting to grow on the tree. Okay, now once you go from harvest, so it takes about it depends on the type of oil that you want to make. Because we make quite a premium extra virgin olive oil, we prefer to harvest our olives olives more on the green side rather than so you know we get green and purple olives. All purple olives were green and all green olives will become purple. So we don't harvest our olives when it's ripe basically when it's when it's purple. We harvest more on the green side and that gives you a stronger more grassy flavor olive oil where you can if you taste it you can feel it in the back you can throw it that olive oil. But that's what that does mean is that you also you get less out of the fruit because it's green so you get less oil out of the fruit. So it's a balance that you have to decide on. So we would typically harvest from as I said from March to May and what drives that is the different varieties that we have. So we have Mission, Frontoio, Latino and Coratina. The last three of them are Italian varieties and the first one is US variety and they ripen at different stages throughout the autumn months. So we would wait until a specific cultivar varietal is at exactly the right ripeness for us to pick it. Then what's important is that you pick those olives within a two week space because you don't want them to get too ripe and you want them to be very similar. The other thing that's important is and this is something that I started to touch on last time before I got cut off but if you pick a fruit today you have 24 hours to get that fruit cleaned through the brace and into a storage location a cold storage location because the moment you pick that fruit from the tree it starts oxidizing because it comes into contact with with oxygen so and that reduces the quality of the oil. So you want to get it into that cold, cool, dark stainless steel container as quickly as possible. So we give ourselves 24 hours to do that. So you don't have a lot of time you can't pick now and then maybe extract the oil two weeks down the line you do that right now but that happens throughout three months. Then typically we will leave the oil in the stainless steel containers for a period ranging between three or two to three months where my father goes into the blending process. Now contrary to wine olive oil doesn't get better with age you actually want an olive oil as fresh as possible. If you are a consumer buying olive oil look on every bottle there has to be a harvest date and a bottling date the bottom of it as well as a batch number look for those batch numbers and make sure that you buy a fresh olive oil and when I say fresh I mean anything nothing less than that or older than a year. Technically if olive oil is stored correctly um regulations or the regulatory authorities or bodies say that you have 24 months in which to consume so if someone is selling an oil older than 12 months it's not that they're breaking any laws or giving you a bad quality oil it's just not the best quality oil that you can get anyway so in those three months my dad would go and he would work on his blends. So you can go and say okay I've got this much from the oil that this much from the chino he would taste what it tastes like so every year you get a slightly different flavor harmony out of each of them and he wants to blend them to make sure that he gets the exact right flavor and the state blend that he wants to sell. So he'll take his time to to taste the olive oil work on his blend and during that time you also send your oils off for testing. There's a lab based in Joerbeck or Petoria where they make sure that the oxidation levels in the oil is right. I'll look for um what's it called the hair dye that's useful um to bleach your hair oh my it's on the bottle I've got the bottle here with me and I can't remember okay so they basically make sure that that the quality of the oil is within regulation of adding an extra virgin olive oil and that there's no toxins or anything bad in the oil. So those lab results back yeah what I want that's the word I don't just repeat that the rock side the rock side I wouldn't know but it has you know it has to be under a certain level sorry Joerbeck. So um what I want to find out is that basically you've mentioned the different varieties and the importance of processing the olive oil within you know minutes after harvesting it right and you mentioned your technique around harvesting the green as opposed to the purple you know once it's ripe. Once you've harvested the green and you're putting it into the processing facility are there any other things that you're adding within that processing element um to maybe make the olive oil maybe taste sweeter I wouldn't know or um especially even flavors does it come in different flavors so what else do you add uh within that processing value take value chain until the actual olive oil is now bottled and ready to be sold. It's a very good question and the answer is absolutely nothing. That's the whole thing about olive oil it is 100 pure olive oil and if you and that's what the difference between extra virgin virgin and the just standard olive oil so extra virgin olive oil means the olives were put through the through the praise only one so that's that initial olive oil that you get from the fruit you get a little bit from the purple but it's the best quality oil that you can get from an olive if you buy virgin olive oil that they means that the I can say the mush that you get on the other side often you've extracted the first round of olive oil gets put through the praise again and then you extract more but that's got a lower quality and it's got a higher like tannin level which is not necessarily always that nice to taste but um you get more oil so you get a bigger yield so there's nothing wrong with it it's just the type of product that you that you want to sell in the end and then if you want I mean you can try it through again but then you're not even close to any formal virginity for the well so um what you see then as as olive oils sold as the flavored olive oil so the chili oil the lemon and reganum oil or something like that that would typically be the oil that gets extracted on the second or third time of putting this fruit through the praise and then they add I don't think it's it's flavored and I'm saying there because it's not something that we do but you would then add your your flavoring so you'd have the in your stainless steel container you could add the chilies and you start infusing the oil and create that the chili flavored olive oil so it's it's I would be quite surprised if someone actually made an extra virgin flavored olive oil just because of the high cost involved in firstly creating an extra virgin olive oil and the quality of the product that you're working with um I can't imagine of flavored olive oil but you don't really see that so the big thing is and that's very important and that's why olive oil is vegan friendly it's um it's got all of these benefits because it's so natural and it doesn't have anything added to it the one thing the one thing that can affect it is obviously your farming techniques if you use pesticides or any growth hormones or something like that that would be in the in the fruit which would then get extracted into the oil but that is something that the um that's tested for in the in the quality controls before you're allowed to sell the oil it's tested for the level of those toxins necessarily in the well and it has it's very low like it's you can't you you struggle to pass with any form of like really hard cool yeah and tell me Bianca with uh Glenn but within Glenn basketball um is a specific percentage of olives that go that go for processing and a specific percentage maybe that goes to to selling directly to your your cost your customers just as olives um or are you completely a processing olive oil farm no we do both okay so for for us we actually work with some of the other farms in our area as well to for the when we sell whole olive product or any product olive product other than like a edible product other than olive oil um we like to use the mission varietal which is a really big like it's got a lot of meat it's really beautiful big olive essentially so it's really nice to have in brine or to pickle because it holds its shape quite well and it goes soggy it's nice to look at a nice um olive and we don't grow on the estate actually as much of the missions as what our demand is at the moment so uh a big part of what my dad's job is is to build relationship with some of the olive other olive farmers and to make sure that he gets the pick of his crop for the quality that he wants to sell under the k muskler label so um our olive will be produced on the farm but that's some of the olives that we sell we actually buy in for processing or for those products and that's also it's definitely something that that could be considered if you're going into an olive oil business um because because we are a smaller farm it's more expensive for us to grow olive okay um and you don't you don't have the bulk where you start getting efficiencies of scale and adding as much on it so we make sure that we produce a world-class extra virgin olive oil and we make sure that we produce world-class olive product yeah but for that we make sure that we've got a supply that's the supply chain that supports that type of demand that we fold up under the brand okay got it you know in the every industry there's almost so much pressure for farmers to start processing or adding some sort of value add to their primary crop you know to just get additional revenue streams maybe to reduce waste on their farms um and also just add another product you know that has a longer shelf life so within your farm as well have you found that this greater chances maybe for profitability um in agro processing or processing the olives or you know is the balance pretty much the same whether you're selling the olive's raw or processed so that becomes a numbers game essentially I like efficiencies of scale you can get um and it depends on which business model you want to follow so we do we do small batch premium quality olive oil we we with that kept in mind that defines the customer that we work with the defined um the stock is that we work with it defines the packaging that we have on the product it defines the way we communicate where you've got your big growers who go into the quantity game and then you start once you've got those high levels of of productions you can start looking at stuff like doing a chili oil and a lemon oil something because you've got this this extra product that you need to start utilizing so I think I think there's there's arguments going both ways yeah um and if I look at what the trend in the industry is we have more we have a lot of more high quality producers and then a handful of the bigger they also do high quality products but then you've got I think there's about like 90% of the industry is almost controlled by 11 big growers or big producers we then go that game yeah well Bianca my last question for this evening is pretty much um what tips would you give to a person who wants to maybe go into the processing uh element of olive oil I remember we had a a young agripreneur a few uh episodes back um who is also growing uh processing his own virgin extra olive oil so you know just for a farmer maybe he's growing olive oils even on a small scale let's say about five hectares 10 hectares uh also and maybe he's just thinking of other alternative ways of getting some additional income for for their farm like what are some maybe two tips do's and don'ts um each two tips each do's and don'ts that you would recommend to an olive uh farmer where agro processing is concerned um so one thing that immediately came to mind as a don't and this is not necessarily on agro processing this is about your final product is don't sell something for the sake of selling it because it can be detrimental and while I say that if I'm going to give you a practical example as we recently launched new packaging where we have a very specialized cap on the bottle which is called the slow pourer which is really nice because it gives you a lot of control when you're pouring your olive oil instead of it just opening under this whole blob of oil folds in your plate what that means though is that it's a non-refillable bottle so once the bottle is empty someone will have to throw that we will have to throw it away and restaurant don't necessarily like spending money on that because it's more expensive for them to keep replenishing new bottles so we considered at some point shouldn't we be looking at a refillable cap but then we realized the moment you start you go that fruit yes we'll get a few initial sales we'll tap into some restaurants we'll be able to make sales to them get some exposure but you have absolutely no control around what happened to that bottle or that oil after the initial product's been used so that restaurant or their consumer can fill it up with whatever they want afterwards they can buy a cheap olive oil somewhere else and fill it into your brand name and the customers are going to consider yes it could be a new market opportunity you will create more demand for us but because we want to market ourselves and position ourselves as a premium product that means you have to control so don't just think about what because that's essentially what you're building you want to build a brand that consumers recognize and consumers trust and then just from making sure that you get the best quality because and everything that inevitably comes into the bucket of harvested olive oil or olives not everyone needs to do that and it doesn't necessarily it doesn't have a bad impact but it kind of takes the taste of it so set yourself up full success essentially from the gate guard is the big the big tip that I can give in this I mean there's a few things from a technical perspective in that one um you asked for two I don't have another don't it's okay I think some of you know quite critical rinsing you know take olive oil agro processing which is her main function uh open above the marketing the branding and the sales with the claim bar screw of olive brand so follow them on social media I know that they are on instagram and maybe you could visit their website I mean there are two time award-winning essay olive competition winners so you know they are selling a very premium brand and they take very good pride and keep processing of the olives and it is a premium brand and if you catch tonight if you missed tonight's episode please catch it on our youtube channel private property under the farming playlist and if you have any specific technical questions around olive oil um or if you want to purchase claim bar screw of olive uh please contact uh Bianca or claim bar screw of directly um onto their platform that's it for me this evening I'm so sad that Zama and sis underscore Zwane could not claim their prize unfortunately um it will go to the next round of winners uh perhaps Thursday maybe maybe not but constantly follow us on our social media platforms uh that's where you'll see the campaign know your crop running share a picture of a crop let us know one thing or two about your crop and you could stand a chance to win 500 grand in cash prize and don't forget our real estate industry summit on the 29th of October which will be held virtually go to our website to see all the other information around that and this is for all the industry the industry or real estate lovers um this is where the summit will be held virtually and you could get all the information around me tonight signing out Balin Walker and I'll see you on thursday at eight p.m take care