The
oil from the fruit of the olive tree has long been known as essential
part of Mediterranean cuisine which is now popular all over the world.
As well as its distinctive flavor, olive oil is also associated with
many health benefits thanks to its high level of polyphenols, it has
been proven to reduce cholesterol and have a positive effect on blood
pressure.
Pioneering
olive company Grupo Elayo is turning this traditional sector into
innovation making use of the health-enhancing bioactive components found
in olives for some of their newest applications. In order to do this,
they extract the seeds from the fruit's hard stone using SORTEX sorting
technology from Bühler.
Based
in The Andalusian province of Jaén, Spain – one of the biggest and most
important olive oil growing regions in the world, Grupo Elayo was
founded in 2012 by José Maria Olmo Peinado, an engineer and economist,
who has worked in the olive sector for over years. Peinado says he is
completely committed to innovation: “We are developing new products and
applications from various parts of the olive including certain
by-products – not only in the field of food, but also for the
pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries.”
Since
discovering that the seed within the olive stone contains up to 100
times more polyphenols and antioxidants than conventional olive oil
Peinado came up with the idea of extracting the olive seeds and using
them for new products and applications in the food and cosmetics
industry. “In the past, we have simply discarded the stones as a waste
product,” explains Peinado, “So I decided to invest in a processing line
to clean, dry, crack open and sort the olive stones from the seeds.
However, problems started at the sorting stage. As the seeds and the
stones are practically the same color, none of the sorting technologies
that we had installed were able to distinguish between them reliably,”
he recalls.
It was not possible to sort out the good seeds for further processing,
however Peinado was not about to give up and he got in touch with
specialists at Buhler Sortex, who have 70 years of experience in
developing optical sorting solutions for various applications and
industries.
After several months of intensive trials, the London optical sorting research and applications department made a breakthrough. Using special InGaAs technology, they found that it was possible to distinguish the olive seeds from the stones as well as from the seeds with embedded stone fragments, thus laying the foundation for a successful extraction process. More