What shortage? Australia’s bumper olive oil season – and one company’s American dream

This story is part of the May 24 edition of Good Weekend.See all 17 stories.

The most eagerly anticipated moment of harvest time has arrived. Dressed in high-vis vests and grandma hairnets, we focus intensely on a machine’s wide spout as the first drops of extra virgin olive oil from Australia’s 2025 olive harvest appear.

In his 27 years of running the country’s largest olive oil producer, Cobram Estate Olives, co-founder Rob McGavin has never witnessed this moment. His general manager, Ruth Sutherland, hands us small, blue plastic cups for tasting; it’s throat-grippingly peppery and pungent, with hints of green banana. Once we slosh the oil onto some swiftly produced sourdough, the camo-green juice becomes truly delicious.

As we tuck into morning tea in the factory kitchen, I ask McGavin if he is relieved to start picking his 40 billion (you read that correctly) olives this year.

“I won’t be happy until the $150 million crop swinging out there in the breeze is off the trees and into tanks,” he says.

Supermarket shoppers will welcome this early autumn harvest almost as much as McGavin and the shareholders in his nearly $800 million listed company. Hours earlier, we had walked into Cobram’s main storage and delivery depot on the fringe of Geelong – only to see the cavernous space almost empty. McGavin was shocked. “We are really scrounging for stock,” one of the warehouse workers explains to him.

The full harvest of the 2.6 million trees from Cobram’s two main groves in Boundary Bend and Boort, and the smaller Wemen grove, all near the NSW border in northern Victoria, is still three weeks away. When the tides of oil start properly flowing, they will be rushed onto shelves just before an Australia-wide shortage sets in.

Oil from the first harvest of Cobram’s olives pours out of a centrifuge.Credit: Nic Walker

Our demand for olive oil has surged in the past 25 years. In 2001, Australians consumed one litre per person a year, with 95 per cent of it imported from European countries, particularly Spain and Italy. Today it’s two litres per head, with 50 per cent produced in Australia. Cobram supplies 70 per cent of our locally grown oil. “There is Cobram Estate and then there is daylight as far as the next biggest producer is concerned,” says Australian Olive Association CEO Michael Southan.

It will be a bumper olive-oil harvest in Australia this year, powered partly by a warm and stable growing season and the fact that olive trees have an “on year, off year” fruiting pattern. This year, it’s all on. Three hundred pickers will converge on Cobram’s groves, harvesting day and night for 10 weeks. By mid-June, more than 14 million litres of oil will have been picked, crushed and bottled in Australia, at least 12 million litres of it coming from Cobram.

As soon as the Geelong warehouse brims with oil again, McGavin and Cobram co-chief executive Leandro Ravetti will turn their attention to another harvest across the globe – specifically, in the Sacramento Valley in California. The company owns 1000 hectares east of the grapevine-lush Napa Valley, and is in the process of adding another 1500. After 11 years of planting olive seedlings, Ravetti claims Cobram is poised to become the biggest producer of US olive oil in the next two to three years.

Probably the darkest moment in McGavin’s career came in 2009, the year Cobram nearly collapsed, and when he succumbed to swine flu. Over the previous decade, he and co-founder Paul Riordan, a mate from Geelong’s Marcus Oldham College, had slowly built the business through a process he jokingly refers to as “trial and terror”. They had asked friends and family to pitch in to help them raise the $7 million needed to plant trees on the upper banks of the Murray at Boundary Bend. Near a now-dilapidated Telstra phone booth surrounded by wild asparagus, they had spotted an old olive tree. “We thought, ‘Well, if that can grow well here, we can plant more,’ ” McGavin says.

Cobram co-founder Rob McGavin.Credit: Nic Walker

Starting in 1999, they planted, ripped up, replanted, tended and harvested different types of olive trees, including picual, hojiblanca, arbequina and coratina, to see which suited the climate and conditions best. But in 2009, a partner they relied on heavily for business, Timbercorp, went bankrupt. Cobram took over Timbercorp’s properties, including its olive groves and processing plants. This takeover pushed Cobram to the brink of collapse and it ended up in court fighting to harvest $30 million worth of olives. It was eventually able to do so – and recover – but “for 10 months it was grim,” McGavin says.

“It was next-level stress. I ended up getting swine flu, then pneumonia, and I just could not get over it. My doctor told me that if I did not take time off, he would stop treating me because there was no point,” McGavin says. “I could not lose hope, though. There were too many friends and family who had invested in us, trusted us with their money.”

Grit was ingrained in McGavin very early in life. He grew up on a farm called Jubilee Park, a 13-hour drive inland from Brisbane in a tiny town called Barcaldine. His dad, Bob McGavin, farmed 8900 hectares, working at least 12 hours a day, even on Christmas Day, to make money from the sheep and cattle they ran. “There were no holidays, no sport, no TV,” McGavin says. “We would not really see any other people much. We were either asleep or working.” School was an optional extra. “One term, I missed 36 days. Dad would say, ‘You learn more from mustering anyway.’ ”

It sounds brutal, but it wasn’t, says McGavin. “I honestly think if you grow up on a farm you’ve won the Lotto in life. You learn to solve your own problems, and you learn how to create your own fun.” Fun for McGavin, his older sister Sue and younger brother Tim, came often in the form of a cockatoo, creatively named Cocky. “We had him for years. He would somehow know when we were returning home from a day mustering, and he’d fly two kilometres out to meet us, then hitch a ride home on our heads.”

Rob McGavin as a young boy on Posy.Credit: Courtesy of Rob McGavin

When McGavin was seven, his mother died of breast cancer. “I remember her empathy and kindness. She was a Christian and every Sunday would pack us into our Kingswood station wagon, and we’d go to church.”

McGavin’s dad, already a workaholic, coped with her death by working even harder. “When you lose one parent, it makes you anxious about the other. I used to spend a lot of nights by the front fence waiting for dad’s ute.” When Bob was 48, he was diagnosed with a type of bone cancer and given two years to live. But he lasted another 13 years.

“For the last three years, he walked around with a morphine syringe in his pocket and would inject himself if the pain got too much. He had a catheter as well. One day in the yards, a ram ripped it out. He just washed it and reinserted it back into his old fella himself.” Losing both parents to cancer contributed to the evangelical zeal McGavin has about the health benefits of olive oil. “Mum didn’t drink or smoke, but she died at 39. We ate meat; we grew on the farm, had vegetables from the vegie patch. But we had a lot of seed oil, refined oil and oils that were probably rancid.”

Dietitian Susie Burrell says there is some evidence that rancid oil may lead to cellular damage over time, but “the primary issue is that the flavour of the oil is unpleasant and nutritional benefits are depleted”.

‘Health officials ... still want to penalise olive oil for containing some saturated fat.’

Rob McGavin

Over the past decade, there has been a revolution in our understanding of a food that’s been on humanity’s menu since 5000BC. Not surprisingly, McGavin and his senior executives frequently tout the benefits of olive oil, especially fresh extra virgin olive oil, and in this they have scientific backing.

“The diet that many in the scientific community agree is the best for disease prevention is the Mediterranean diet, of which extra virgin olive oil is a staple. It should be the main added fat we use in our cooking,” says Professor Catherine Itsiopoulos, associate deputy vice-chancellor of RMIT University and an olive oil expert. But she warns, “olive oil is not a drug you can just take on its own; take a couple of tablespoons and everything will be OK. It is not enough. You need to change your diet.”

What makes olive oil different from seed oils such as vegetable, canola and sunflower is that it contains polyphenols. These polyphenols (often detected as the “throat-gripping” bitterness in oil) act as antioxidants and, importantly, contain anti-inflammatory properties, Itsiopoulos says.

The growing acceptance that olive oil can reduce cholesterol and inflammation, along with the risk of cancer and heart disease, has encouraged Cobram to fund research, establish the Olive Wellness Institute, and lobby the government to change the current food health-star rating system, which rates olive oil as 3.5 stars. “I feel so let down by the health officials in this country who still want to penalise olive oil for containing some saturated fat while ignoring the health benefits of it,” McGavin says.

Olives ready to be picked.Credit: Nic Walker

Helicopters and light planes are to McGavin what Ubers are to city dwellers. He spends considerable time flying between the Boort and Boundary Bend groves, and the farm he lives on with his wife, Kate, and three adult sons in western Victoria.

We fly in to Boundary Bend just as giant trucks are bringing the first lot of olives in from the groves. McGavin explains the oil-making process as the olives are sent jostling along a belt where they are stripped of leaves, stems and dud specimens. In a three-step “crush, mix, spin” process, olives are pulverised into a paste, the flesh ripped and torn to release the oil, stored in sacs. This crude tapenade is then churned for 30 minutes to bond the tiny oil droplets together. The mix is then funnelled into a centrifuge that separates the oil from the water and flesh of the olive.

Harvesting the olives.Credit: Nic Walker

The first drops of oil we capture come from coratina and picual olives, two of the 30 varieties Cobram grows. They will go into specifically labelled First Harvest bottles. The aim is to pick most of the 40 billion olives at what McGavin calls “peak oil accumulation”. This is still three weeks off. The First Harvest olives have a lower oil-accumulation ratio but are very high in polyphenols, and picking them is a way to test the machinery before the army of contractor pickers converge on the groves.

Many of the incoming pickers are “grey nomads” – older, retired couples who arrive in their camper vans to set up home near the Boort and Boundary Bend groves. Their job is to operate the 28 apartment-sized picking machines, reverently referred to as either Colossus or Optimus, for 12-hour shifts.

McGavin, Ruth Sutherland and I walk behind a lumbering Colossus as it pushes along a row of arbequina trees at a top speed of 400 metres per hour. A column of plastic claws shakes each tree to strip it of olives and feeds them onto a conveyor belt and into a waiting truck which, once full, will head straight to the nearby mill.

Company policy dictates it must take no longer than six hours from tree to tank – from the olives being plucked then crushed and pumped into storage vats ready to be bottled. “The faster the process is, the more health benefits are kept in the oil,” McGavin says. “If you leave the olives sitting around off the trees, they start to ferment.”

McGavin’s aim is to make the healthiest oil – with the highest content of polyphenols – for the cheapest price. A 750ml bottle of Cobram Estate oil cost $20 two years ago. Today it is $25, a hike blamed on higher production costs. At the same time, the price of imported olive oil has risen by 70 per cent; this is attributed to severe droughts in Europe causing a global undersupply of oil, according to the Australian Olive Association’s Southan. “But we are not seeing demand drop,” he says. “It seems we are still willing to pay for olive oil even while prices rise.”

Cobram’s massive storage vats: company policy dictates taking no more than six hours for the olives to be moved from tree to tank.Credit: Nic Walker

Demand is expected to rise 5 per cent a year over the next five years, with the total value of the Australian market forecast to reach more than $500 million by 2030. This may seem massive, but is a thimble compared to the size of the American market, currently worth $US3.1 billion ($4.8 billion) and predicted to grow by 7 per cent a year to 2030. This explains why Cobram is looking to the US with a confidence not shared by many other Australian companies now, especially in light of the US-imposed tariffs.

Ravetti, who was born in Argentina, says Americans still largely think, as Australians did 20 years ago, that the best olive oil comes from Europe. The US produces only five per cent of the olive oil it consumes, mostly in California, which has textbook-ideal growing conditions for olives. The rest is brought in from places like Spain and Italy.

It has not been an easy ride for Cobram since it started planting groves in California in 2014. “American retailers didn’t want to know about a little Australian company, even if it was making the oil locally,” says Ravetti. But by 2022, the business began ramping up its operations, and has planted 200 to 400 hectares of olive trees every year since then.

Ravetti predicts that in five years’ time, Cobram’s revenue will be higher in the US than in Australia. McGavin aims to supply “locally grown, high-quality extra virgin olive oil to retail outlets across the USA”. It’s a bold ambition. But the boy from Barcaldine is on a mission.

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