Scaling a Global Agricultural Manufacturing Business

Rob McGavin is the co-founder, Chair and Non-Executive Director of Cobram Estate Olives.

Cobram Estate Olives was founded by Rob and Paul Riordan in 1998. Over more than 20 years the Company has grown to become the market leader in the Australian olive industry and a global leader in sustainable olive farming with operations in Australia and the USA and a portfolio of premium brands. Today, CBO’s extra virgin olive oils are recognised for their world class quality, receiving 475 awards since 2003 including one of our Cobram Estate® products from California being named one of the world’s healthiest extra virgin olive oils in 2017 and 2022.

CBO operates a fully integrated business model which is unsurpassed in the Australian olive industry. Today, CBO is Australia’s largest olive farmer with over 2.4 million olive trees planted on 6,584 hectares of freehold farmland and produced an estimated 72% of Australia’s total olive crop in 2022. In the USA, the Company’s owns 207,500 olive trees planted on 358 hectares of owned and leased land in the California.

The Company’s large-scale olive groves and olive mills are some of the largest in the world, enabling the Company to achieve efficiencies in olive growing, processing, and marketing.  CBO’s proprietary growing system, Oliv.iQ®, allows it to grow more olives per tree, accumulate more oil in those olives, and extract more olive oil out of the olives at a higher quality and lower cost of production than the next best growers in the world, as highlighted in a recent study by U.C. Davis, California USA (2019).  All the while using less water, less fertiliser, and sequestering more carbon per litre of olive oil produced than global averages.

Join us to hear from Rob about his incredible journey, and his mission to produce the world’s best extra virgin olive oil.