Cairo – Tunisian olive and olive oil producer Olyfo Olive Oil Company is rapidly expanding in the global market and plans on breaking into Brazil. Olyfo is the brainchild of childhood friends Ahmed Hamza and Yahya Chemli and was created in 2020. Three years were enough for the company to reach several foreign markets.
Ahmed and Yahya have a family tradition in olive oil production, especially Yahya, an agricultural engineer who specializes in olive production. Ahmed has a wealth of experience in Marketing, having worked in for several international firms. Ahmed Hamza talked to ANBA about the company.
According to the businessman, Olyfo caters to countries like Russia, Ruanda, Vietnam and the United States, as well as five European countries, but it seeks to enter new markets and expand in others, notably the US, where the company’s products will be launched on e-commerce platform Amazon in April. Exporting to Brazil is one of the goals of the Tunisian company.
Ahmed says that the company seeks markets in the Latin American continent as a whole, particularly Brazil, the reason why it became a member of the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce (ABCC). Olyfo plans on using that to get a closer look at the Brazilian market and obtain studies to identify the local needs and consumer characteristics. The businessman sees Brazil as a large and promising market for Tunisia’s olive oil.
Olyfo owns farms that gather different types of olive threes. The main one is the traditional Tunisian olive tree. Different species of Spanish and Greek origin, distributed across several regions of Tunisia. From the country’s North to South, each region is characterized by a specific degree of olive flavor and aroma, which allows the company to cater to the needs of all clients.
Olives and olive oils
The company’s olive trees cover an area of 450 hectares, but Olyfo also acquires additional crops from local farmers to cater to the growing demand for olive oil. The processing capacity is 30 tonnes of olives a day, with 1,000 to 2,000 tonnes of products packaged per year. There’s potential to make an expansion soon.
According to Ahmed, the company gave greater attention in the past to the crop areas. But now the primary focuses are olive oil production and exports, once foreign partners are successfully added to the shareholding structure in 2023 with the purpose of identifying the work and increasing the production capacity.
Tunisia manufactures some 200,000 to 300,000 tonnes of olive oil per year, the businessman said. The country exports over 80% of its production, especially to Spain and Italy, which mix the oils manufactured by the Tunisians with their own oils and reexport them as local products.
Translated by Georgette Merkhan & Guilherme Miranda
