Bottling your Oil
It’s one thing to remove the oil from the olive, but the next step is to get it into a transportable and easily marketable package. Unless your planning to hand fill your bottles in front of the TV each night, the following information is essential to your research.
The primary factor determining your most economical and efficient method of bottling is the volume of olive oil you plan to produce. There are three main options available to the processors of varying sizes.
The first method is to manually fill the bottles by hand out of storage tanks. This means trying to get the correct amount of oil into each bottle without spilling it, getting the label on straight, and sealing the bottle. This method is slow but satisfying and would suit a grower with a small amount of oil or some cheap labour at hand.
Contract bottling... the second method of bottling is to use a mobile contract bottling plant. These already opperate in the wine industry and should, with a few alterations be able to bottle olive oil. The bottling machine is set-up either on a semi trailer of trailer towed by a 4WD. The grower provides all the bottles, labels, closures, cartons and usually labour. The contractor will then bottle, label, seal and place the bottles in a carton or as required of the task at hand.
Your own Bottling Machine
The third option is to buy or lease a bottling plant yourself. There are many different machines available, some will perform just the filling of the bottles and others will do the entire process.
To see some bottling machines press this link.
