Gavin Dunne is a pioneer. He has created a new food from olive ‘waste’ for the Wagyu beef market, the most expensive beef in the world.
Olive oil is a vital component of the Mediterranean diet and perceived by many as a natural health-food product. However, the olive waste stream, produced as a by-product of manufacture, can cause some challenging environmental issues. In 2017, a creative Irish startup devised a way to convert this crop waste into a high-value animal feed, favoured by the €1 billion a year Wagyu beef market. CEO, Gavin Dunne of the Olive Feed Corporation, shares his intriguing, circular economy ambition.
“Waygu beef, supplemented with olive feed is intensely marbled with softer fat.”
Olive-fed beef
I came up with the idea in October 2016, while I was living in Crete, surrounded by millions of olive trees spread across valleys and mountain slopes. However, it was during a business trip to Japan, that I was first introduced to olive-fed beef. It was uniquely being produced in a tiny region, called the Sanuki Region. Some 100 years ago a small number of olive plots were planted there, and one local farmer had been using dried olives, as a supplementary feed for his Sanuki (Waygu) beef cattle. Drying the olives makes it a little more palatable for animal intake, but it’s not the best processing method for optimum digestibility by the animals.
Waygu beef, supplemented with olive feed is intensely marbled with softer fat and higher percentages of monounsaturated fats. In Japan, olive-fed Wagyu beef is now the most expensive beef in the world, and straight away I could see the commercial opportunity. I contacted my business partner and environmental scientist, Brian Dunne who has a farm in Edenderry and we decided to test and assess some of the olive feed out on his
