When the olives arrive at the factory they go on a conveyor belt and get washed to separate all of the twigs and leaves. They quickly get treated to keep the olives fresh.
Then the olives are sent to a grinder. If they are ground too fast, they will get hot because of friction. If they get too hot, it means we can’t use them in the oil.
Then the ground olives are pressed. They use a machine and they press the oil out of the olives. The oil comes out a gold colour.
Another way to extract the oils is to spin the olive in a centrifuge. They put the oil from the olives in a centrifuge to get the water out of them. Water and oil have different densities so they will be separated in the machine as it spins. They then siphon out the oil. The grinded pulp remains can be made into fertilizer or animal feed.
Supermarket olive oils are typically stored in steel tanks and then pumped into dark green bottles.
The reason the bottles are dark green, is so they don’t get “Sunburned” as the U.V light will affect the quality of the oil.
And that how you make olive oil!
