Olive Nation Blog

Beware of cheap Olive Oil

Posted by Amit in Olive Oil, Jun 05 2008

Illegal: In Italy, some manufactures have been recently caught  mixing canola oil and other cheap oils with olive oil to sell it at lower prices. This is dangerous because people who are allergic to some of the other oils could get sick.

Legal: While Spain produces 70% of the world’s olives, Italian sells 70% of the world’s olive oil. How does that work? It is common knowledge that the bigger Italian olive oil manufacturers will import olives from Spain, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Israel and other places so they can  press them and bottle the olive in Italy which allows them to label it as “Made in Italy”. It’s perfectly legal. Personally, I have had great Spanish olive oil, and Moroccan and Tunisian olives. There’s nothing wrong with their olives or their olive oils. But then I’d rather have the oil from those countries directly. Why should I buy something that was trucked over great distances over a two week period just so it can be labeled “Made in Italy”? It’s just not high quality.

So, how do you tell? Well, look at the list of ingredients on the olive oil bottles to see if they tell you where the olives are from. Usually they are required by the FDA to do so. Or see if the olive oil has a DOP icon anywhere. The DOP guarantees two things about Italian olive oil:

1. The olives used were produced locally in the same region where the oil was pressed.

2. The local authority sampled the olive oil to ensure that it meets its high standards.