Are you ready for olive pasta?
Olives make a great snack and a delicious pizza topping, but 90 percent of olives end up as olive oil. Which is good for your cholesterol, but leaves a problem. Leftovers.
After olives have been squeezed for their liquid, the 85 percent solid that remains often ends up being burned or buried because, frankly, it’s useless. And it’s toxic, and it’s acidic, and it stinks.
Within 15 minutes of the olives being squeezed at an industrial mill, the waste matter, called pomace, starts to oxidize.
The nutrients disappear, it becomes unfit for human — or animal — consumption, and it can’t even be used as fertilizer because it contaminates the soil.
And while olive oil has been a staple since biblical times, upcycling olive pomace into a useful, successful commercial product has remained elusive.
Until now.
PhenOlives, an Israeli startup, has perfected a mechanical method of rescuing the waste product in the tight window before it oxidizes, and turning it into gluten-free flour and other commercial products.
PhenOlives presents olive mills with a “total solution” — installing its patented machinery to transform a mountain of smelly leftovers into useful, edible, sellable, profitable products.
This could be a gamechanger for the industry and could provide olive farmers with an extra revenue stream.
According to Chen Lev-Ari, the company’s CEO, trucks will no longer line up at the olive mills to collect tons of byproduct for landfill. Instead, the trucks will deliver high-fiber, low-calorie flour to food manufacturers to turn into bread, pasta, crackers, cookies, brownies, pizza… you name it.
So what exactly is the breakthrough? Well, that’s a secret.
Lev-Ari says they’ve developed a machine that divides the olive waste into three components — pulp, black water (the wastewater from pressing ) and seeds.
The process is completely natural, doesn’t use chemicals or additives, and is readily incorporated into the existing olive milling process. After the pulp is extracted, it’s dried and then ground into flour.
Lev-Ari, who has a background in managing products and supply chains and a particular interest in agriculture and recycling, embarked on his olive journey in 2019.
He spent three years researching and developing ways to process the pomace and founded PhenOlives in 2022.
It was important to find a solution that didn’t just turn the olive pulp into gluten-free flour. It was all or nothing — they had to deal with the whole 85% of the olives that now have no use. The olive mills wanted the waste taken off their hands entirely, and that’s what PhenOlives is promising to do.
Olive flour will be PhenOlives’ first commercial product, and Lev-Ari is eager to show off brownies, cookies and other goodies baked with it.
The flour will, in most cases, be combined with wheat and other traditional flours. It’s gluten-free, which means it doesn’t have elasticity or water retention properties needed to make bread, but it works well as a minority ingredient in an 80/20 mix with other flours.
It’s fine as a 100% flour for crackers and can be used at 50% for pasta, muffins and pizza crust, and 30% for cookies and brownies. And it boasts all the health benefits of olive oil.
Israel21c.org
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