An Ongoing Commitment to Sustainability

Bell-Carter Foods has deep roots in the California environment and the global olive industry. We are the largest table olive producer in the US, and sell well over half the California-grown olives in the nation.

Groundbreaking Environmental Initiatives

Since 1912, Bell-Carter has been focused on delivering you the best olive products, at the highest quality available. To us, sustainability is not a buzzword or an afterthought, it’s what we’ve done all along and will continue to do. It’s what will enable us to continue providing the highest quality olive products for the next 100 years.

We’re making great progress, too, having reduced our production facility’s carbon footprint by 3% since 2007—a significant reduction for a facility of our size.

In fact, our many sustainability initiatives – focusing on water use, energy efficiency and waste reduction – are getting us closer to our goal of becoming a zero waste company.

Renewable Resources

We capture the value of all renewable resources available to us at Bell-Carter Foods, from the energy of the sun to the natural, reusable byproducts of our manufacturing system.

• We send our pits, culls and other byproducts to an off-site facility for energy cogeneration. This process captures the natural energy in our waste products and feeds it back to the electrical grid.
• Our wastewater treatment system uses a natural, biological digestion process along with ultra-filtration systems.
• Our discharged water is used for agriculture and municipal uses.
• The bio-solids from our wastewater treatment system are helping to support the creation of mulch and other high-grade soil amendments.
• The energy used for powering two of our buildings and one parking lot comes from solar power.

Zero Waste

Our goal at Bell-Carter Foods is to operate a manufacturing process that can create as much energy as it uses, and reuse every resource at our disposal – all toward the goal of achieving zero waste.

With that in mind, our future looks bright. We’re hard at work evaluating a number of new initiatives, from using our waste products to produce bio-fuel for our truck fleet, to a solar power water heating system.

It’s all a part of our past efforts and ongoing commitment to sustainability. Plus, saving resources and cutting waste simply makes good business sense.