Rox's EVOO(Olive Oil) for sale on Amazon!

two_bit_score · Oct 3, 2018

akita1 said:
Because when I get a message at 2am from a tractor forum about olive oil its just a bit strange. Thats why I care... NO NEED TO GET YOUR PANTIES IN A BUNCH.

You really need to calm down. There is nothing on this forum, as good and fine as it is, that should wake you up at 2am.

Thats just crazy to allow that. Change your settings.

TBS

rox · Oct 4, 2018

PJSprog said:
Rox started a new life many years ago, and came here looking for answers to tractor-related questions. She's as much a part of this community as anyone. In fact, she's kind of a legend here.

Okay so I bolded that end part because it was so shocking to me.
You guys are to good to me, you really really are.

I do think my story belongs on TBN, and it is in the right forum, "Related Topics" It's farm related.
So more on farming. We will open the moulin (mill/olive press) October 27, so we are scurrying around doing annual set up activities. The company rep we bought our mill equipment from has turned into a friendship. Every time he has business in the area he stops by and we always feed him. Nico had called him and asked him to stop by and help him grease the machines. Remember Nico is a chef, and he does almost all the farm work but to be honest he would just prefer to have an expert work on equipment. Here is how it works, Nico is in charge of 2 machines and I am in charge of two machines.

My machines are the maloxer (like a big agitator) and the centrifuge where the oil is actually extracted. Once the oil has been extracted the olive paste (sans oil) is pumped out the back of the centrifuge and drops down into a hopper. The hopper has a pump on it and we attach a hose to the hopper and pump the used ground up paste through the hose and outside the mill, where it drops onto a 3PH wagon. So after our friend did the greasing up I said that my waste pump leaks a little, se he says, "I'll drill a hole in it" Now this did NOT seem like a good idea to me since I said it leaks a little, why would you drill a hole which is going to make it leak even more? He's like, no, no, no, it really should get a hole drilled in it and he pulls out his drill with a big titanium drill bit and drills a hole onto the bottom of the pump. Then he jams a thin screwdriver in and starts poking around. Out comes old ground up paste. Okay not good he says, now we gotta take the whole thing apart.

Next he proceeds to dismantle the pieces and I see he is 100% right, there is ground up paste in there. He says that this motor does not take grease and so it has to be cleaned out or else you are going to wear out the motor. I was left with the biggest part and used the screwdriver, the vacuum cleaner and degreasers to clean up my part. Our friend takes the other part to the workbench and installs a new bearing and a new clapper, then he put everything back together again. I told him I wasn't happy because I had a small leak and now you drilled a hole. So he tells me, oh just put a cup under it, which is what I had been doing in the first place with that slow leaked I mentioned which started us down this path. But I know he is right, I can see how that pump will work better with the hole in the bottom. But I bet that hole is going to get plugged up with ground paste anyway so time will tell. I asked to stop a small leak and he gave me a BIGGER leak, go figure.:laughing:

I am painting the moulin floor. We got some most excellent paint on line from a professional paint company that we used to paint our big balcony, it is an oil based paint that you have to pour a resin into it and then you only have an hour to work it. I like that paint but it is high gloss very slippery when wet. On the balcony I bought from USA a company that makes a product for boats, it is tiny rubber balls, (like sand) and we used those rubber balls to make a pathway on the balcony so we don't slip when it rains. I really liked those but those are really expensive. I contacted the paint company and ask if they could give me that same paint with the resin in it but make it a satin finish, they couldn't. But he said they could make it anti slip. My French is not that great and I couldn't figure out how they could make it anti slip so I ordered a kilo (about a quart) and I tried that out in an are under the stainless steel vats where if I didn't like it, it wouldn't hurt anything either.

What he meant by anti skid is tiny, tiny little balls in the paint. I had to test it by pouring olive oil onto it and see if I could wipe it up easy, then I threw a glass of water on it to see if I could get the water to squeegee with my big squeegee and it came out okay. It does grab the wipes I use to wipe up small oil spills but it's okay. So when I finish up here I'll get an order in for the paint but I willl only use the anti slip in a couple of areas where I work. I had a hip replaced and I am very very cautious about slipping and falling. I did the test painting first and am glad I did.

It's a beautiful day here about 80 degrees and sunny. Just a beautiful day to be working getting ready for the harvest. Nico put the pallet scale outside this morning also.

Finally at Amazon I had each varietal of olive oil be it's own separate listing and then in one listing the different sizes. I think people are not noticing that they come in different sizes because to see that you have to look over to the right hand side of the web page. For clothes they give a drop down list right at the beginning of the listing by the pictures, so you can see that the product comes in different sizes. But for food they took the different size information and took it off of the center of the web page and moved it way over to the right. What I am going to do next, is take a screenshot of the listing webpage and then edit it and draw a big circle around where the different sizes are on the web page (way off to the right). It is the only thing I can think of to compensate for the really poor way Amazon shows the buyers the different sizes. People generally look at all the pictures so I thought this would be a good way to alert the users.

The Amazon sales have been good, I am happy with them although we are not of course a huge seller by any means. I have let my stock run down and am fixing to have a big shipment sent in out of our cold storage warehouse we store at. Last year for Christmas we didn't have any inventory at all on Amazon, I am sending enough right now that I hope will carry me through the Christmas season. I am kind of curious on how our products will sell over the Christmas season since we have not been able to try that yet.

Amazon is a constant never ending struggle, with their software changes they make to their back end. It's just constant, I do not understand how a big company like that has such sh*tty testing before deploying. One of their back end updates blew out ALL of my listings, all of them. When people searched on Amazon "Mas Des Bories" it said, "No Mas Des Bories on Amazon but here would you like to try this OTHER brand olive oil?" It took weeks for them to fix that, in the meantime of course I didn't get hardly any sales. In fact I was surprised I had any sales at all. Their IT is horrible, just horrible and then to add insult to injury they never tell you that they are going to run an update or that they did run an update. You notice by looking at your sales, when you see sales stalling you go in and look at your listings. They never tell the Amazon Sellers about any software updates which would alert us to go check our listings. It's just constant and never ending with Amazon. On 3 products they did not list ALL of each item for sale that I sent in. On AOC half a liter they put 18 of them into "Reserve" which usually means they are transferring them between their warehouses. But when your products sit in Reserve for a long time you have to check on that. Turns out for some reason they never tell you what the reason is, when some (but not all) of the products were transferred between warehouses the software dropped off the expiration date so they were not eligible for sale. Again, no notification at all, you just have to watch your account and say to yourself, "Gee those have been in Reserved Status for to long, I better put in a support request to see why." It just never never ends with Amazon, it is not at all like set it and forget it. On August 15th I started a support request about 18 half liter AOC in Reserved Status, just last night they finally activated the final 3. See, it is not set it and forget it.

Take care everybody and if you do buy our olive oil PLEASE leave a review! Please, hardly anybody leaves reviews any more.
~rox

rox · Oct 11, 2018

Well now don't I just feel completely affirmed

The European Union is fanatical about their food. The member countries get together and once a year they run an undercover food sting. It will be like this, Italy will take ham that year for example, and so the Italians will go around Italy and sample hams. The Netherlands will get assigned a different food and so on and so on. Well I guess France got assigned olive oil and it didn't come out so great. (About 4 years ago Germany had the olive oil sting investigation and it came out just as bad)

Here is an article in English about it
Real d'olive? Half of olive oils sold in France are not what the label says - The Local

Here is the French Governmet Website about the French sting investigation
DGCCRF - Plan de controle 216 des huiles d’olive | Le portail des ministeres economiques et financiers

And I have taken the liberty of translating it using Google translat and post what I think are the most relevant parts.

[snip] The DGCCRF's investigators inspected 286 establishments in the olive oil sector: distributors, websites, wholesalers and traders, mills (producers), markets and fairs. 42% of them had anomalies (up to 59% for websites).

Of the samples collected, nearly four in ten were of French origin. The others came from Mediterranean countries, the world's leading producers. (rox i.e. Italy, Spain and Greece)

[snip] The rate of non-compliance is higher when the indication of origin is not precise (edit rox: perfect example is when it says Meditereanean blend) and when the oil comes from countries with the largest volume of production.

[snip] One in four samples was declared "to be monitored" and 67 samples (48%) were declared non-compliant [1]

[snip] Thus, five oils analyzed had been falsified by the addition of refined oils of sunflower and / or rapeseed. One sample contained pesticide residues despite the mention of an absence of "treatment residues".

[snip] Two other orders were issued against two food wholesalers for the recall and destruction of oils purchased from the same trading company and marketed under the name "extra virgin olive oil", while analysis revealed that it was a mixture of vegetable oils.

[snip] theft of the Protected Designation of Origin (AOP) logo, even the use of an appellation of origin that does not exist (edit rox, we are an AOC, wich is the exact same as AOP, they are trying to transition this across Europe AOP to replace the term AOC)

[snip] The rate of non-compliance has remained at a very high level in the olive oil sector for several years. The communication on the origin of the extra virgin and virgin olive oils imposed by the regulations as well as the regular checks therefore remain fully justified.
Target Results

286 properties

139 samples

Institutional non-compliance rate: 41.6%
Levels of non-conformity of samples: 48%
71 warnings
39 injunctions
17 tickets
3 prefectural decrees of destruction

Well... my oh my, the biggest fraudsters come out of the biggest production countries. 71 warnings is mainly for missing and/or information on the labels. but 39 injunctions is pretty bad, and they went after 3 sellers and ordered them to destroy their stock. I hope the inspectors went over there and watched the stock being destroyed with their own eyes.

At least with every bottle or tin of our olive oil we sell on Amazon you get a letter with a copy of the lab results on that olive oil. Although this is indeed bad news for the industry and the consumers it is pretty good news for me

More and more people will buy from us directly from the farm. Let the buyer beware is so so true when it comes to olive oil.

I'm out of a couple of sizes at Amazon, I have a small pallet getting delivered on the 17th from my cold storage warehouse. Then it has to get checked in at Amazon and that takes a while, so I figure right around the start of November I will have my inventory back full again. That is right when we will start our harvest and I sent plenty so I didn't have to get distracted with Amazon during the harvest.

Not much going on on the farm, we have had rain for a few days and that's good. Nico rolled up all the irrigation hoses and we are just messing around in the mill. He moved a bunch of 5 liter tanks into the filling room to make way for the pallets of tins and tanks that should arrive next week. We are stocking up for the harvest. Our lead picker, an air traffic controller at the air force base, is getting excited, he dropped by yesterday to check on the maturity of the olives. He's such a great guy. I predict Nico and I will be working our tails off this year in the moulin, I bet we will grow earnings by at least 25% minimum on pressing for the public. I think we are going to have a great year at the mill and we have a good crop ourselves, a lot of olives. Yeah :cool2:

buckeyefarmer · Oct 11, 2018

Thanks for the update.

Kyle_in_Tex · Oct 13, 2018

rox said:
Well now don't I just feel completely affirmed
The European Union is fanatical about their food. The member countries get together and once a year they run an undercover food sting. It will be like this, Italy will take ham that year for example, and so the Italians will go around Italy and sample hams. The Netherlands will get assigned a different food and so on and so on. Well I guess France got assigned olive oil and it didn't come out so great. (About 4 years ago Germany had the olive oil sting investigation and it came out just as bad)

Here is an article in English about it
Real d'olive? Half of olive oils sold in France are not what the label says - The Local

Here is the French Governmet Website about the French sting investigation
DGCCRF - Plan de controle 216 des huiles d’olive | Le portail des ministeres economiques et financiers

And I have taken the liberty of translating it using Google translat and post what I think are the most relevant parts.

[snip] The DGCCRF's investigators inspected 286 establishments in the olive oil sector: distributors, websites, wholesalers and traders, mills (producers), markets and fairs. 42% of them had anomalies (up to 59% for websites).

Of the samples collected, nearly four in ten were of French origin. The others came from Mediterranean countries, the world's leading producers. (rox i.e. Italy, Spain and Greece)

[snip] The rate of non-compliance is higher when the indication of origin is not precise (edit rox: perfect example is when it says Meditereanean blend) and when the oil comes from countries with the largest volume of production.

[snip] One in four samples was declared "to be monitored" and 67 samples (48%) were declared non-compliant [1]

[snip] Thus, five oils analyzed had been falsified by the addition of refined oils of sunflower and / or rapeseed. One sample contained pesticide residues despite the mention of an absence of "treatment residues".

[snip] Two other orders were issued against two food wholesalers for the recall and destruction of oils purchased from the same trading company and marketed under the name "extra virgin olive oil", while analysis revealed that it was a mixture of vegetable oils.

[snip] theft of the Protected Designation of Origin (AOP) logo, even the use of an appellation of origin that does not exist (edit rox, we are an AOC, wich is the exact same as AOP, they are trying to transition this across Europe AOP to replace the term AOC)

[snip] The rate of non-compliance has remained at a very high level in the olive oil sector for several years. The communication on the origin of the extra virgin and virgin olive oils imposed by the regulations as well as the regular checks therefore remain fully justified.
Target Results

286 properties

139 samples

Institutional non-compliance rate: 41.6%
Levels of non-conformity of samples: 48%
71 warnings
39 injunctions
17 tickets
3 prefectural decrees of destruction

Well... my oh my, the biggest fraudsters come out of the biggest production countries. 71 warnings is mainly for missing and/or information on the labels. but 39 injunctions is pretty bad, and they went after 3 sellers and ordered them to destroy their stock. I hope the inspectors went over there and watched the stock being destroyed with their own eyes.

At least with every bottle or tin of our olive oil we sell on Amazon you get a letter with a copy of the lab results on that olive oil. Although this is indeed bad news for the industry and the consumers it is pretty good news for me More and more people will buy from us directly from the farm. Let the buyer beware is so so true when it comes to olive oil.

I'm out of a couple of sizes at Amazon, I have a small pallet getting delivered on the 17th from my cold storage warehouse. Then it has to get checked in at Amazon and that takes a while, so I figure right around the start of November I will have my inventory back full again. That is right when we will start our harvest and I sent plenty so I didn't have to get distracted with Amazon during the harvest.

Not much going on on the farm, we have had rain for a few days and that's good. Nico rolled up all the irrigation hoses and we are just messing around in the mill. He moved a bunch of 5 liter tanks into the filling room to make way for the pallets of tins and tanks that should arrive next week. We are stocking up for the harvest. Our lead picker, an air traffic controller at the air force base, is getting excited, he dropped by yesterday to check on the maturity of the olives. He's such a great guy. I predict Nico and I will be working our tails off this year in the moulin, I bet we will grow earnings by at least 25% minimum on pressing for the public. I think we are going to have a great year at the mill and we have a good crop ourselves, a lot of olives. Yeah :cool2:

rox, I hope you have a great crop!!!

ronjhall · Oct 13, 2018

buckeyefarmer said:
Thanks for the update.

Ditto.

two_bit_score · Oct 13, 2018

Rox, doing the right things for the right reasons always pays off in the long run. Congratulations!

TBS

rox · Oct 14, 2018

I was going through pictures, I found out I should use a feature on Amazon called Amazon Store, where I can show all my products on one web page so I am working on that and going through my pictures. I thought I would post two pictures.

These two pictures show very clearly the difference in yield, how much oil are you getting out of the olives.
The first pic, that is a lot of oil coming out, I would say that yield is about 23%. In other words if I press a hundred kilos of olives I will get back 23 kilos of olive oil, the conversion to liters is just a bit higher than kilos, 23 kilos of olive oi is 25.10 liters.
I probably took this pic because of the great yield coming out.
...

Now here somebody brought us olives that had a very very low yield. This yield is terrible, I can tell by the volume coming out of the pipe off the centrifuge what the yield is going to be. I can tell just by looking. This is like a 10% maybe 12% yield.

...

And here is a picture from last year of our moulin. It is always always this clean. In the foreground you see bonbons. Those are big 20 liter glass jugs placed in a basket with straw around to protect the glass jug. The blue barrel is full of olive oil, that is a barrel made of food grad plastic for olive oil, the customer got so much oil I can see Nico filled part of one of our 5 liter tanks as well as the customers barrel. On on the 5L tank I see our cash register receipt. I find I really enjoy running up all the cash register receipts

....

Here is more oil that we pressed for locals, and notice all the cash register receipts on them

More oil we pressed for Customers

Last year some of our customers brought is these little tiny black olives. These are customers who did not water their trees. They were literally all nut and no meat (probably that pic of the low yielding oil that was coming out of the centrifuge was some of those). We had a devil of a time with them, because there was barely any oil or any moisture in them they did not slide through our hoses and pipes on the milling machines. They backed up our equipment. it was a mess. I told Nico to refuse them but he took them anyway and didn't listen to me. And the oil was just terrible tasting anyway, it was really bitter horrible bad tasting olive oil. I always ran those last at night, and then we clean the equipment afterwards. After about the third plug up I hit on a solution, I pulled a hose over to the crusher and as the olives dropped into the crusher I ran a little bit of water, that is how we got through the season, I added water into the crusher with those little tiny black shriveled up olives.
...

...

Here is the mess it made with the crusher until I developed a system.

We have a lot of customers who bring us this many olives. This is right around 100 Kilos, they will get about 20 liters of olive oil more or less depending on the yield. That is my husband Nico with his OSHA approved work shoes :dance1: he is right next to our big scale that holds a pallet. We have to get the scale inspected every year, the scale guy should be coming this week. Because we charge by kilo of olives you bring us, the State makes us use a scale that is certified inspected accurate. We don't have a lot of expenses here but that is one we have to pay every year.