The Sican Network: partners
An organic gourmet evo.
Here’s Valeria’s Oil
Says the woman who gave the company its name and together with her husband propelled it into the international market, “We like to call ourselves farmers.” The use of special bottles
A small family business projected onto the international market. An excellent oil with a unique flavor. The l’Olio di Valeria farm in San Biagio Platani is part of the Distretto rurale di qualità dei Sicani, the collective brand that promotes as a territorial unicum the vast and varied area that stretches from the sea to the Sicani Mountains, and unites a network of agricultural activities and production of goods and services, endowing them with a certification that guarantees their quality.
Born and raised in Germany, Valeria Licata, who gives her name toValeria’s Olio, produced on the farm of the same name, returned to Sicily and stayed for love.
“It was the year two thousand,” she says, “and everything changed: the century, the millennium and my life. My parents are originally from San Biagio Platani, where we used to go back in the summer, and that year the meeting with Salvatore (the man who would soon become her husband ed.) revolutionized everything. By the way, he was the one who decided to name our oil after me.”
It was his father-in-law Agostino Midulla who had founded the farm in 1987; and it was already producing excellent oil that was not bottled, however.
In 2019, the turning point. Following Agostino’s passing, Valeria Licata by profession a dental hygienist and her husband Salvatore Midulla, a surveyor, took over the reins of the business and began bottling their extra virgin olive oil, a fragrant, deep-green blend of Nocellara, Biancolilla and San Benedetto; a quality-certified, strictly organic oil that now reaches Germany, Belgium, as well as some regions of northern Italy, such as the Veneto.
“Despite Brexit,” says Valeria Licata, “we continue to work even with England, where our customers seem to have no intention of giving up our oil. The goal, however, remains to open up more and more to the international market, and it is for this reason, and also to guarantee an entrepreneurial future for our children, that we are counting on expanding, always maintaining the genuineness of our product.”
Currently, theorganic farm Olio di Valeria covers eleven hectares in the territory of Biagio Platani and produces about five thousand liters of extra virgin olive oil per year. A product of great value, destined for restaurants, specialty food stores and, in general, for the most demanding gourmets.
Much care has been taken in the packaging, which has been enriched with designer bottles in the shape of a Moor’s head, created by Sambiagi artist Carmelo Navarra.
“Ours,” says Valeria Licata, “is a team effort. The whole family gets involved: twenty-one-year-old Maria Elisa, eighteen-year-old Alessia, and the most passionate of all, Agostino, who is sixteen years old and studying at the Agricultural Institute. First of all, we like to call ourselves farmers: our oil is produced exclusively with olives grown on our land and harvested as early as the beginning of October, at an early stage of ripening, to ensure a product with excellent organoleptic and nutritional qualities.”
Text by Editors
