Used to be Graber olives were a culinary institution — for those in the know. They were prized by celebrities like Lucille Ball and Jimmy Fallon and served annually at the Masters golf tournament dinner. New York City’s venerable Russ & Daughters market sold them for decades and decorated its first restaurant with Graber cans.
Canned olives aren’t usually such an exciting prospect. They tend to be briny with little hint of the, well, oliveness under the salt. But Grabers are a different experience altogether: big, meaty and green with a rosy hue, and something like eating a pod of pure olive oil.
“It’s just that nice buttery flavor,” said Renee Landingham, who manages the Olive Pit store in Corning, Calif., which sold Grabers for decades. “We still have customers come by and ask, ‘Where’s Graber? Where’s Graber?’”
That question may have an unhappy answer.
Today, the 130-year-old cannery in Ontario, Calif., sits silent and empty, its future in doubt. For two years in a row no high school students have helped out during the fall and winter season, and seasonal workers have not returned to fill cans with the buttery, tree-ripened olives on equipment that is more than a century old. The paper detailing the company’s curing recipe is hidden away in a safe deposit box.
The nation’s oldest olive business might be gone forever, done in by a combination of extreme weather and shaky finances. An emergency $1.55 million loan comes due in March, and the Graber family worries it might be the end.
“I’ve got people asking me, ‘Is this my last can, in my hand? Should I serve it for Thanksgiving or hold onto it?’” said Maura Graber, who owns and runs the company with her husband, Cliff, whose grandfather founded the cannery in 1894. “We don’t have answers.”
It’s not just nostalgia at work. The family says Grabers are California’s only tree-ripened olive, which gives them a unique flavor, size and color. Other “ripe” black olives (usually manzanillo or sevillano) are actually picked by machine before they’re ripe and are treated with lye and turn black when oxidized. Graber’s manzanillo olives are allowed to ripen to a pinkish green before they are picked by hand, cured and canned, usually with the pits intact.
Graber olives are grown in two orchards totaling 80 acres, about 200 miles north of the company’s headquarters. In good years, the company would produce 50 to 60 tons of olives, equal to more than 100,000 cans. But Graber yielded about half that total in 2022, its last canning season.
The company’s decline started more than a decade ago, when California farmers were bedeviled by the worst drought in state history, from 2011 to 2017. Tens of millions of trees of all species died during those years, and small companies like Graber had a particularly tough time surviving. The lack of water made the skins thicker and the olives harder to eat, and much of the crop from those years was used for oil.
“We had to buy extra water,” Ms. Graber said. “We had to pay three times as much on the ranch just to keep things alive. We just had to make tough choices.”
One of those tough choices shortly after the drought was selling the orchards to their longtime manager, Jay Zike, who had grown up adjacent to the property and started working there as a child. Mr. Zike agreed to keep growing the olives the same way they had been grown for more than a century and to keep selling them to the Grabers as long as they could afford them.
But a family squabble led to an expensive lawsuit, which was settled shortly before the pandemic shut down the Grabers’ shop and events business. Then lower olive yields forced the company to stop selling to brokers who had distributed Graber cans around the world.
“We barely had enough to make it through each year,” Ms. Graber said of the financial situation in 2021 and 2022. “We were having a real hard time keeping up. This was something we knew was a slippery slope.”
Then, in 2023, springtime heat — or frost or rain or wind that year, depending on who you ask — led to a fall with virtually no olives. The crop failure hit growers up and down the state’s Central Valley, Mr. Zike said.
“Olives are finicky,” said Mr. Zike, who has kept the Graber name on the orchards even though he was forced to sell the olives to another cannery last year. “Even the old-timers don’t have an answer.”
The failed 2023 season meant Graber cans quickly disappeared from shelves at the company store and the few Southern California supermarkets that sold them. The sudden lack of revenue prevented Graber from being able to hire pickers last year, which led to a second straight year without canning.
Any number of extreme weather conditions can destroy an olive business relatively quickly, said Javier Fernandez Salvador, the executive director of the Olive Center at the University of California at Davis. Under normal circumstances, he said, only 1 to 3 percent of pollen ever turns into olives, and cold, hot, wet or windy conditions can lower that percentage dramatically.
“If it gets over 85 or 90 degrees, which can happen, the pollen gets less viable,” said Dr. Fernandez Salvador. “It’s exactly the same when it rains. There’s very little room for error.”
But for decades Graber was about more than just the beloved olives.
“It was just the camaraderie everybody had,” said Louis Garcia, who started working at Graber as a 15-year-old gardener in 1969, when his father was the general manager. He spent the next 50 years working his way through almost every job at the cannery. He’ll be ready to return if the business bounces back, he added. “Everybody would come back every year. I just really looked forward to working there.”
The Grabers say they’re hoping for a lifeline that will allow the company to survive. The cannery property is for sale, but offers have been far below the $3 million asking price, and the company owes thousands in past-due bills for utilities and expired licenses.
While Mrs. Graber said she was losing hope, her husband appeared more optimistic. A former Army serviceman — “We were a pretty tough outfit,” he said — Mr. Graber planned on using some of that military grit to save his family’s company. The plan, he said, is to lease the property from a new owner and then buy it back in a few years.
“People all over the world have enjoyed Graber olives,” he said. “Right now we are ready to get going. We’re looking forward to the next olive season, and we’re ready to rock.”
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