Stephan Britz started curing olives back in 1989 when he was still a student at Stellenbosch. His father was an olive lover and the apple did not fall far from the tree.  Every year after that – for 22 years he cured somewhere between 10 and 50kg of olives. He tried different varieties of olives such as Kalamata, Mission, Manzanillo etc.  and quickly discovered that Kalamata olives are the true “prince of olives”. From 1998 he started experimenting with different flavors of Kalamatas – among others, smoked Kalamata, a technique his father taught him. All his friends and people who tasted his olives asked him to make more and supply them with their “annual olive need” and so, in 2012, he decided to go a little bigger and cured 500kg of Kalamatas. Initially he bought the olives from farms in the Stellenbosch district, but soon realized that the quality and size of the olives were not consistent from year to year.  He also learnt that, on an average olive farm, the amount of insecticides and pesticides used on the olive trees were way too much for what he considered to be healthy.

In 2016 Stephan and his family moved to Anathoth farm in the Stellenbosch Winelands where he planted 510 Kalamata olive trees in the Spring of 2016.  He was, for the first time, in a position to manage the entire “food chain process”; from caring for the trees to picking and curing the olives and bottling them. Initially he thought that he will have his first harvest around 2022 but the trees grew so well that they picked their first 2 tons in April 2020.  A year later – in April / May 2021 they picked a staggering 7 tons of Kalamata’s (almost 14 kilo’s per tree) which is quite an amazing feat for trees only 5 years old.