Boundary Bend, Australia’s largest olive producer, intends to make a splash in the US market with antioxidant-rich extracts from fresh olive leaves.
Boundary Bend’s line of olive leaf extracts is standardised to different levels of oleuropein, one of the bitter marker chemicals in the leaf (it’s also present in the fruit but is removed in processing to make table olives palatable). Technical Director Leandro Ravetti said that Boundary Bend can offer a truly standardised product, which he said other olive producers struggle to do.
Although the trees at Boundary Bend are relatively young, the age of the trees is not important for a fully bioactive product: “Once trees reach full maturity (approximately in 6 to 7 years), the bioactive content of the leaves is approximately the same. Rather than being influenced by the age of the tree, management and environment play a much more important role in shaping up the bioactive profile of the product,” Ravetti said.
Ravetti said the company’s new extracts, which are sold under the Boundary Bend Wellness brand as olefresh 4000, olefresh 5000 and olefresh 6000 for different concentrations, differ from most olive leaf extracts because they are made from fresh leaves. Most other producers used dried leaves, he said.
“The main bioactive components of olive leaf extracts are natural antioxidants. The process of drying leaves and extracting those components later on is detrimental to the concentration and diversity of those products. Fresh leaves contain the highest quantity and diversity of bioactive components. Harvesting and processing them over a very short period of time helps in capturing that richness and diversity,” Ravetti said.
In addition, Ravetti said Boundary Bend only takes leaves from trees that are actively setting fruit. He maintained that this is not standard practice in the industry, where a leaf is a leaf.
“When you have an unhealthy plant that isn’t producing fruit, you aren’t getting all of the awesome biphenols that naturally occur in a healthy fruit-bearing tree. This has been proven many times over in molecular level competitive testing against all available olive extracts on the market currently,” he said.
“We treat our trees with extreme care in order to produce the best quality fruit, and this is also true for the leaves. High levels of management technology applied to the growing of the olives and the leaves allow for consistent levels of bioactive components and full traceability of each batch to the trees that we have picked to produce it,” Ravetti added.
The extracts are produced in its own facility in Australia and are TGA compliant.
Source: Nutraingredients USA
