Flexibility

One of the basic principals of The Olive Oil Source is flexibility. We feel that the best service we can offer to our customers is to provide them with what they need and not require nor limit them to purchase everything from us. If they have a specific bottle they want to use that we don't carry or want to label bottles themselves, fine. If for example, they have a direct tie to an E.V.O.O. (or anything else) producer in another country and want to augment those products with ones we have, that's fine. There's no reason they shouldn't be able to give their operation a bit of personal flair and in our opinion, they are a lot more likely to succeed if they do.

Something we spend a lot of time doing is bottling and this is a perfect example of our flexibility. As we mill fruit for a lot of central coast wineries, they often have us bottle and label the olive oil too. Sometimes they use our glass, sometimes not. Currently we are bottling about 9,000 bottles for Stolpman Vineyards. We made their oil with fruit they grow and harvest, we're bottling it in bottles they supplied but with closures and shrink wraps from The Olive Oil Source, and we're doing the labeling with labels they sent to us. This morning I was checking in on the bottling progress of their order.

While bottling is essentially a very simple process, being appropriately licensed to is not. As we handle organic and non-organic products, just some of the regulation we have to adhere to is getting Processed Food Registrations and Organic Processed Food Registrations from the California Department of Food and Agriculture, have regular inspections from the state health department, surprise inspections from federal health inspectors, inspections from our organic certifier, annual certification from weights and measures, testing from the water quality control board, a documented food safety management system and our larger customers require a third party audit of our FSMS. That's not all, but you get the point.