YOUR INDUSTRY
James Greenlee, Grove Manager
Tauranga bottler aims for the top
AVOCADO FEATURE
It’s the good oil – Avocado Oil New Zealand Ltd selling under the ‘Grove’ label, based at Te Puna near Tauranga. Words by Geoff Lewis : Photographs by Trefor Ward Founded by entrepreneurs Doug Batchelor, Brian Richardson and Harman Grouwstra, Grove now produces and exports avocado oil to more than 20 countries worldwide including China, Japan, Russia, Australia and the Middle East. Global sales and marketing manager Greg Ryan says the avocado oil extraction business started off as a small-scale enterprise more than 20 years ago using a reconditioned German Flottweg olive oil press which is still in use today. “We believe we were the first in the world to produce extra virgin avocado oil, and aim to produce the best quality avocado oil in the world.”
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The ORCHARDIST : MARCH 2021
The avocados go through the machine and the extracted product is stored in one-tonne, 1,066 litre bags or ‘intermediate bulk carriers’, packed in onecubic-metre square boxes before being bottled. The raw material comes in the form of 2 million kilograms of ‘processor grade’ fruit, mostly from Bay of Plenty avocado packhouses – fruit which is not up to standard for sale and export as fresh produce. “We started to go around the world and see if we could sell it. At that stage there were very few people producing extra virgin avocado oil and the industry was in its infancy.” Ryan says avocado oil has become sought-after in culinary applications as it has the second highest ‘smoke point’
