🫒 Mission

Mission is a Californian dual-purpose olive cultivar: it gives both oil and table olives. The name recalls the Spanish missions. In the 18th century Franciscan padres brought olives to California and planted them at every coastal mission south of San Francisco. The first commercial orchards were planted with young trees from these groves, and that is how the cultivar came about.

Mission's exact origin is unknown. A 2011 genetic analysis of the US Department of Agriculture collection in Davis showed that it is closest to old Iberian cultivars: Manzanilla de Sevilla, Picual, Verdeal and the South American genotype Azapa. Gordal Sevillana could have passed one allele to Mission at each of the 15 DNA regions tested, so the researchers suggest it is a selected seedling of Spanish olives. In the same collection, a sample called Zitoum turned out to be a clone of Mission.

Until 1900 Californian growers produced mostly oil, but they could not compete with cheaper European oil. The industry then switched to table olives: the California black-ripe method appeared in 1905, and by 1910 canned black olives had become the state's main product.

Today Mission, together with Gordal Sevillana, is popular for table olives, although Manzanilla de Sevilla has been California's most widespread cultivar since the 1960s. New oil orchards are mostly super-high-density; according to the University of California, Davis, Arbequina gives about 70% of California's olive oil.

Why it matters to you. When the label of a Californian bottle or jar says Mission, it points to a cultivar descended from the olives of the Spanish missions. Because its fruit works for oil as well as canning, the cultivar name alone does not say what is inside: check the oil category or how the olives were prepared.