Around this very day 10 years ago, in a conference room in the grounds division office, Dan Flynn and a handful of others turned out the first run of UC Davis Olive Oil — pressed from olives off campus trees.
ANNIVERSARY SALE
You can taste and buy UC Davis Olive Oil at three locations on Picnic Day (April 18):
- Main bookstore (east wing of the Memorial Union)
- Welcome Center
- Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science
Here’s the 10th anniversary deal: $10 for the Silo, Gunrock and Roasted Garlic blends. That’s a discount of almost 17 percent off the regular price. (The Estate blend is sold out.)
Students in the Food Tech Club will staff the olive oil tasting tables.
OLIVES AND MORE
The crew filled bottles by hand, plugged in the corks and stuck on labels. The fruit of this labor went on sale a few days later, at Picnic Day 2005.
Look for UC Davis Olive Oil at Picnic Day 2015, at a special anniversary price. See box for details.
How did that first batch of 1,200 bottles sell? “Wham! They were gone on Picnic Day,” Flynn said. Within days his makeshift assembly line went back to work, filling 800 more bottles.
Quintessential campus souvenir
Over the succeeding years, production numbers have quadrupled to 8,000 bottles a year, as UC Davis Olive Oil has become the quintessential campus souvenir: extra virgin oil blends with names like Gunrock and Silo, from trees at the world’s No. 1 agricultural school.
Flynn said he estimates the sale of more than 50,000 bottles over the last 10 years (and, thankfully, we have a vendor who does the bottling now). The Gunrock and Silo blends are mainstays, along with Estate and Roasted Garlic, and we’ve had such special editions as Wolfskill, Centennial, Olio Nuovo and President’s Blend (chosen by then-UC President Mark Yudof).
While justifiably proud of the olive oil program’s success, Flynn admitted he never thought he would be at UC Davis beyond the first harvest and production. After all, he was simply an olive oil hobbyist at the time.
Today, he’s way beyond hobbyist, running not only the UC Davis olive “business,” which has grown to include bath products and table olives, but the world-renowned UC Davis Olive Center, too, established in 2008 and still the only olive research and education center of its kind in the United States.
Slippery problem
Flynn came to UC Davis at the behest of then-grounds manager Sal Genito to help him solve a slippery problem under a row of olive trees on the campus side of Russell Boulevard.
By now the story is legend: The olives that fell from the trees didn’t just make a mess on the path below; bicycle tires slipped in the oil, and sometimes the riders went flying.
Genito figured: If life gives me olives, why not make olive oil? He then persuaded Flynn, a former legislative consultant in Sacramento, to prepare a feasibility study for free.
Flynn calculated the olive oil program could save the $60,000 the campus was paying each year for cleanup and accidents, and bring in some $11,375 annually from the sale of about 125 gallons of olive oil. The grounds division allocated the money as follows: $4,485 to harvesting, pressing and bottling, and $6,875 to marketing, promotion and research to help the industry.
Olive Center is born
Flynn, though, saw UC Davis contributing even more to research — as he began his transformation from olive oil hobbyist to expert.
So he pitched an idea: a formal program to address the research and education needs of California olive growers and processors, to help them deliver better quality products at better prices for the consumer.
“That was my job for 17 years as a consultant in the Legislature — coming up with ideas — some of them take off, some of them don't," Flynn said. "Here at UC Davis, I kept getting the green light” — olive green? — “and the next thing you know I’m running the Olive Center.”
A news release dated Jan. 18, 2008, declared: “Hoping to do for olives and olive oil what it has done for grapes and wine, UC Davis this week launched the first university-based olive research and education center in North America.”
Start-up funding came from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and the Office of Research ($75,000 total over three years) and industry ($25,000) — and olive oil revenue, of course!
The center, part of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, has been self-funded since 2011, with a third of its revenue from research grants, a third from courses and a third from sales. “Every bottle of olive oil we sell helps us carry out our research,” Flynn said.
Today, the center has a full-time researcher and more than 90 faculty and staff affiliates, and, over the center's first seven years, a record of $2.5 million in grants, 99 research projects (delivered or in progress) and 30 published papers. Research topics range from olive orchard management to the health impacts of olive oil.
Mislabeled product
In 2010, the Olive Center documented the extent of mislabeled olive oil in the United States — i.e., oil that isn’t “extra virgin” as claimed. The landmark study led to a federal investigation, European trade negotiations and new protocols by high-volume buyers.
“Five years later, that study is still reverberating,” Flynn said. “A lot of people criticized us for telling the truth, but no one’s refuted it.
“Because an institution with UC Davis’ credibility did the study, it really had an impact.”
The Olive Center continues to lead the way on quality standards. Last year the state’s olive oil industry relied on the center's research in proposing the world’s strictest governmental regulations for olive oil; the state Department of Food and Agriculture adopted the rules last fall and cited the UC Davis research behind them.
In the field of olive oil evaluation, the center is trying to make the process “faster, better and cheaper.” An undergraduate student team is helping in this effort: Working with research director Selina Wang, Ph.D. ’08, the team developed a biosensor that won the grand prize in 2014’s iGEM international science competition.
Planting new trees
The first batch of olive oil was all UC Davis, mostly from the trees on Russell Boulevard. After a few years, though, Flynn stopped harvesting there — the task proved problematic, because of the trees’ proximity to traffic.
But he and Genito didn’t want another dangerous mess. So, in 2007, with expert guidance, the campus pruned the branches over the bicycle path.
Since then, the olive oil program has supplemented its supply with donations from industry, while at the same time planting new trees — enough so that Flynn believes the oil program can be 100 percent UC Davis again.
The new trees are in three orchards, two off Hutchison Drive west of Highway 113, and one at UC’s Wolfskill Experimental Orchards, also west of Highway 113, way west, in fact, near Winters.
Of the two close-in orchards, one is organic (the only such orchard on the Davis campus), with 20 varieties, mostly for oil (the Estate blend); while the other is for research on the viability of dwarf rootstocks.
Olive oil ‘magic’
Flynn acknowledged the Olive Center has a ways to go to catch up with the Department of Viticulture and Enology in terms of what it has done for industry and consumers — but he’s quick to add: “They’ve been at it since 1880!”
There’s no doubt, however, that the campus has embraced its olive oil and the Olive Center as strongly as the university’s viticulture and enology department.
UC Davis Olive Oil’s success also has spawned other campus-grown products: Russell Ranch Dried Tomatoes, for example.
Genito, who now runs the grounds division at UC Berkeley, said what he loves most about the UC Davis Oilive Oil programis how campus got behind it. “When that happens, there’s magic, and that to me is what makes the UC Davis Olive Oil story so great.”
Media Resources
Dave Jones, Dateline, 530-752-6556, dljones@ucdavis.edu