Olive Auction built this page from public records so buyers can find the estate. Its own people can claim it at no cost — complete the story, list lots, answer buyers.
After a claim, we confirm by emailEverything here comes from public sources — award lists, certification registers, the territory inventories. The rest of the story — the family, the grove, the real age of the trees, this year's lab sheet — only the mill can tell, and it is the part buyers bid on.
Canaan Palestine works from Burqin, near the city of Jenin, where its factory and facility stand. The company's own twentieth-anniversary account puts the beginning in 2003, when Dr Nasser Abufarha, raised in the farmlands of Jenin by the company's description, set out to build a route to market for olive farmers who had lost access to one. He organised growers village by village; 1,500 showed interest, and in 2004 the Palestine Fair Trade Association was founded as the governing body for the farming side, with Canaan Palestine as the label the oil would carry. The network is now recorded at 52 cooperatives and more than 2,400 farming families, with 44 staff at Burqin, 16 of them there more than ten years.
Certification came early. Canaan was certified Fair for Life in 2006, a step it credits to supplying Dr. Bronner's, which was looking for an olive oil meeting fair trade standards, and which it says came before international fair trade bodies had written olive oil into their practices. The company is also Regenerative Organic Certified, and runs the Canaan Center for Organic Research and Extension alongside its Trees for Life planting programme. Its single-variety Rumi is the one the producer describes as the indigenous Surri olive of Palestine, putting most Rumi trees at between 1,000 and 2,000 years old; Nabali and a Jenin bottling sit beside it, carrying Fairtrade, USDA Organic and Regenerative Organic Certified marks.
From the public record: canaanpalestine.com
A producer account takes a minute — name, mill, region. We attach this profile the same day.
Lab numbers, tree references, harvest dates, a photo — the tap-through form asks only for what buyers pay for.
Auction with a confidential reserve, or a fixed-price allocation. We review it and it goes live.
The catalogue goes to this list before it goes on the site. When the sale closes you get every hammer price from it — including the ones that disappointed.
Two emails. Then quiet until Sale No. 2.
