How do you get your product into Harvey Nichols, the up-market UK department store? Simple, really. You grab a bag of your produce, knock on the door, the main buyer turns your product over in his hands and says, “Yes, great, we’ll take it.”

Well, that’s how it worked for Island Olive Grove, Tasmanian-based producer of value-added olives, tapenades, fetta, antipasto products and olive oil. But, of course, you have to have a few ducks – or olive trees – in a row to make it happen.

“My husband is a corporate lawyer and he’s flying around all over the place,” smiles Wendy Roberts, Island Olive Grove’s director, sitting in her brightly coloured office, a result of her other career as an interior designer. “He regularly calls into London so I said take some olives with you . . . and it was bang – straight into Harvey Nick’s! But we had a good product; it’s presented well and that goes a long way . . .”

The company has exported for only two years, but already the process has captured Ms Roberts’s ample imagination and enthusiasm. Island Olive Grove products can be found in major UK and US department stores and interest is also flooding in from Europe. Denmark’s fascination with Tasmania due to former Tasmanian Mary Donaldson’s planned May 2004 marriage to Crown Prince Frederik has also boosted interest. “In many ways exporting is easier than the domestic market,” Ms Roberts said. “You’re just dealing with one person, one company – and it’s one set of paperwork. You’re not dealing with multi-buyers.”

In Australia, we take value-added olives for granted. It’s not the case, however, in continental Europe and the UK. For Island Olive Grove, part of the export process has been to ‘educate’ the market about its products.

“The Danes weren’t used to a value-added olive and even the UK wasn’t,” Ms Roberts said, adding that her main strategy has been to get the product in front of people so they can see the packaging geared to emphasise Island Olive Grove’s home-grown approach, and taste it for themselves.

“The contact in Denmark came through an Austrade-organised Australian food fair a few months ago,” Ms Roberts said. “And we were only one of ten Australian companies chosen to represent Australia; we sent a lot of products and that’s where that interest came from.”

For most of its history Ian and Wendy Roberts’s Coal Valley farm was devoted to vegetable and other crops. They still produce peas for Simplot and have a large vineyard from which they – and several wineries – source grapes. But when the couple returned to Tasmania after a 10-year sojourn in Sydney, they decided they wanted to expand the farm’s horizons.

Olive farming began as a hobby for Ms Roberts. But now Island Olive Grove has taken over her life, in the nicest possible way . . .

“I grew up on an apple farm and there’s a bit of a difference between biting an apple off a tree and an olive,” Ms Roberts laughs. “I can’t even tell you the time when the thought [to grow olives] occurred; it just happened and that was the road we took.”

In 2003, Island Olive Grove processed 50 tonnes of olives and expects to increase this to 75 tonnes in 2004. In order to have year-round availability for their myriad products, the company sources olives from all over the state and mainland Australia. Though the company plans to eventually have 20,000 trees, it now has about 8,000. “There are other companies doing value-added olives,” Ms Roberts says, “but to my knowledge we’ve got the biggest range . . . They’re doing it, but they’re not doing it as well, are they?” she laughs.

Ms Roberts’s latter quip runs counter to the great Australian notion of being a “small poppy” and chopping down the big ones. It runs even more counter to what Tasmanian restaurateur, Kim Seagram, calls “that fabulous Tasmanian modesty”. But to meet Ms Roberts is not to meet an arrogant, driven business person. Rather, she is passionate and extraordinarily energetic.

As well as her farming interests, Island Olive Grove and her interior design business, she is with her husband involved in building development projects in Tasmania. As well as dovetailing with her design interests, this works well with Island Olive Grove: products are placed in serviced apartments (as well as key hotels in Tasmania). “It gives us a good indication of what the public likes,” she says.

The company’s Riversdale range has also just been launched; a selection of award-winning extra virgin olive oils and Pink Verjuice, a cooking wine made from new Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes.

“Riversdale’s going to the US and we’re talking to Harvey Nichols about getting it in there,” Ms Roberts said. “They’re opening an Australian restaurant and doing a big promotion in September 2004 so hopefully we’ll have the Verjuice in by then.”

As well as adding at least two new products per year, Island Olive Grove is planning to have by late 2004 an olive tasting and education centre on the property. But despite these advances, Ms Roberts is aware she must maintain the image and quality that initially attracted people to Island Olive Grove.

“The enquires we’ve got from Europe are huge,” she said, “and we’ll be able to fulfil them. But there is such a hands-on element that if we lose that we’re also going to lose a certain amount of the integrity of the product. People like the fact that the labels are put on by hand, not that you can really see that. Overseas, it certainly is what people want – and the fact that it is manufactured in Tasmania is significant.”