Olive oil company Frantoio di Santa Tea in Reggello

Tour through a company that produces very high quality olive oil -- they have the entire process, from trees to finished bottled olive oil. Beatrice was our guide for the tour, and the Managing Director, Piero Gonnelli took some time from his day to answer questions from the group. The Gonnelli family has been running the company since 1585, and the museum area dates from even before that (1426).

The company has fifteen full-time employees and produces about 1,000,000 bottles of oil per year. They have their own trees and the harvest of those trees requires another 50 people during the months of November and December. Farmers with their own olive groves bring olives to sell to Santa Tea, or they can have Santa Tea process their olives and take the oil back to their farm.

The equipment they use in the production facility is quite advanced, and the company is always looking for new technologies to improve the quality of the oil. Much of the process is done in the absence of oxygen, to minimize the oxidation of the oil, so that it will remain at the highest quality for a longer period of time.

The harvest season runs from November to December, and the olive processing part of the plant runs up to 24 hours a day during that time -- the olives need to be processed within 12 hours of being delivered from the olive grove. Oil is then stored in large tanks and only bottled when orders are received. The bottling line also runs inside an enclosure to prevent oxygen from touching the oil until the customer opens the bottle. Many Italians will order a large quantity of fine oils like this right after the harvest and keep them in their houses during the year (until the next harvest), so preventing oxidation of the oil is very important.

They also recycle the waste from the olives by drying it and turning it into a pumice, that they then use to heat the facility in the winter. The water that comes out of the olives during processing is also captured and used to fertilze olive groves.

6/12/2006