There have been rumours going round recently that young Thai coconuts were dipped in formaldehyde before being exported, which many of us hoped was not true. Matt Amsden (of RAWvolution) decided to find out by having a coconut tested, and thankfully for us young coconut lovers, the test came back negative – no trace of formaldehyde in any part of the coconut. Read the full story here. (Edit March 2026: The original website has gone, this is a link to the Web Archive, you have to scroll to near the bottom of the page to read the text.)

I’ve always liked olives, but one day while I was living in Spain, I had a fresh, raw and truly ripe olive. What a revelation! When ripe, they are quite different to the processed olives generally available. Olives quickly became one of my favourite foods. I would spend hours sat under an olive tree eating ripe olives.

I think olives are usually mis-understood. Most olives start off green eventually turning black. People assume that when they are black they are ripe. This is not the case, if you’ve ever picked a black olive off a tree, you will know that they are not ripe, they are still very bitter. Processed olives are picked when they are either green or black and still unripe and then processed with either salt or chemicals to get ride of the bitter flavour and make them edible.

Nature has it’s own way – the black olives fall from the tree and ripen in the sun on the ground. They shrivel up slightly and then they can be eaten without any processing.

So now you can imagine how happy I am to finally have raw ripe olives available in the Funky Raw shop!