The Olive Press, the Wairarapa family business that has pressed olive oil for growers across the lower North Island for 27 years, is being wound up after its shareholders concluded they could no longer keep the operation going through what they described as the toughest conditions the sector has seen.
Director Rod Lingard said the company’s shareholders were devastated to be leaving the industry, and pointed to a combination of difficult economic conditions and a lack of investor interest as the reasons the doors were closing. BDO has been appointed as liquidator and is now seeking expressions of interest in the company’s assets, which include presses, blending equipment and the Greytown facility that has operated since the late 1990s.
The collapse matters beyond the loss of one regional employer. The Olive Press was the only registered wholesaler in New Zealand of certified premium extra virgin olive oils. It pressed and bottled for a range of grower clients, ran its own groves, and supplied independent grocers, restaurants and chefs who wanted oil that carried Olives New Zealand’s certification. With the company gone, food service customers who relied on certified local oil now face a choice between seeking out smaller boutique pressers or reverting to imported product that is not held to the same testing standards.
South Wairarapa Mayor Dame Fran Wilde said the closure was disappointing for the district, where olives are a meaningful part of the rural identity that has grown up alongside vineyards and boutique food production in Martinborough, Greytown and Featherston. She said her hope was that growers in the area would still be able to access local processing through the region’s remaining operators, but acknowledged that some would now have to truck fruit further afield or leave it on the trees.
Olives New Zealand executive officer Emma Glover said the industry body was confident the wider sector had enough capacity to absorb the work that The Olive Press had been doing. She told RNZ that the company had managed groves and pressed for a range of growers, and that other certified pressers around the country were already in conversations about taking on additional clients ahead of this autumn’s harvest.
Lingard was less measured. In comments reported by the New Zealand Herald he was sharply critical of the industry body, saying Olives New Zealand had not developed a growth strategy or a marketing plan, and that government research funding withdrawn from the sector had compounded the problem. His view is that without coordinated promotion of locally pressed extra virgin olive oil, the premium end of the market cannot grow fast enough to support investment in pressing capacity.
That tension sits inside a paradox in the New Zealand olive sector. According to Olives New Zealand, the country has roughly 300,000 productive trees spread across 300 groves, producing somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 litres of oil a year depending on the season. Demand for locally produced extra virgin olive oil has been outstripping supply for several years as consumers shift toward fresher, traceable cooking oils for health reasons. New Zealand consumes around 4 million litres of olive oil a year, but local production accounts for less than 10 percent of that.
In other words, the industry has a willing market and a quality story to tell, but not enough scale to satisfy it, and not enough commercial infrastructure between the trees and the supermarket shelf to lift volumes quickly. The loss of a large, certified wholesaler in the middle of that pipeline is exactly the sort of pressure point that can hold back growth in a niche import substitution category that should, on the numbers, have plenty of room to expand.
Olives New Zealand membership runs to about 200 growers, ranging from hobby blocks of fewer than 100 trees to commercial groves of 40,000. The industry has long argued that with the right research and marketing investment, New Zealand could substantially reduce its olive oil import bill and develop a recognised premium export, in much the same way that the wine sector did in the 1990s. The withdrawal of the Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures research funding that Lingard referenced is a sore point for grower advocates who saw the work on yield improvement, pest management and fruit quality as essential to closing the gap with Australian and Mediterranean producers.
For Wairarapa growers, the immediate question is practical. Harvest is just weeks away. Some will be able to truck their fruit over the Remutaka or up to Hawke’s Bay, where other certified pressers operate. Others may decide that the freight bill makes harvest uneconomic this season and let the fruit drop. For consumers, the practical consequence is likely to be slightly less local oil on shelves over the coming year, and a continued reliance on imported product to fill the gap.
Liquidators BDO are inviting expressions of interest in The Olive Press’s assets, raising the possibility that the equipment and the brand could be picked up by another operator. That would be the ideal outcome for the region’s growers and for the certified premium category. Whether anyone steps up will depend, in Lingard’s view, on whether the wider industry can show there is a credible plan to grow demand for the genuine local product.
What do you think the government, industry body or local councils should be doing to support boutique food and beverage businesses through tough conditions? Have your say in the comments.
See also NZ Wineries and Wine Regions — Newswire’s interactive map of New Zealand’s wineries and the regions they sit in.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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