Geolit, the Science and Technology Park of the province of Jaén has hosted the extraordinary assembly of the Spanish Association of Oil Mill Masters and Operators (AEMODA), which has its headquarters in the park, and in which Manuel Caravaca has been re-elected as president of the association for a period of four years. At the meeting, Caravaca presented his new board of directors, which includes new names, and after taking stock of the term of office that has ended, he outlined some of the future projects that the association has set for itself.

During the assembly, Caravaca explained that the new board of directors “maintains the same base and we are reinforcing it with the incorporation of new members to give it a boost” and has marked as immediate projects to be carried out “the creation of a new website and the creation of a mobile application that will serve both to project our collective to the rest of the citizenship and to keep in touch and channel the information that we generate among our members”.

The new board of directors will once again have Manuel Caravaca as president, with Juan Alberto Soto as vice-president, Cristóbal Amezcua as treasurer and Pedro Fernández as secretary. José Pérez, Juan Olmo, Francisco Gutiérrez, Sergio Ortega and Vicente Serrano have joined the management board as members.

For its part, the outgoing board of directors also reported to the assembly and took stock of the activities carried out during the term of office that is coming to an end “among which the most important are the training sessions and meetings on issues that have a lot to do with our day-to-day work in the companies in which we work: very specific training at the request of the associates. And training that we have focused on at our headquarters in Geolit, but which we have also taken to different parts of Spain over the last two years, such as Badajoz, Castellón and Seville, for example”.

In these two years of existence, AEMODA has reached 138 members from different parts of Spain and has achieved the adhesion of 36 collaborating companies to its initiatives. According to Caravaca, “it is an exponential growth in a professional sector that was not used to working together and that has led us to have collaborators and associates even outside Spain, mainly in Italy and Portugal”.

AEMODA was created in the spring of 2013 to bring together the group of technicians (masters and operators) working in olive oil mills. A group that was created for various purposes, although among them, “the most important is the dissemination of the culture of extra virgin olive oil in our country”, in the words of its president. But in addition, he adds, “Aemoda aims to continuously train its members in the performance of their profession through periodic events, such as conferences, courses, seminars or congresses; to defend the rights and interests of its members; to promote the constant improvement of the quality of its members’ professional services; as well as to spread a better knowledge of the profession of oil mill master and operator among society”.