There is a particular feeling of panic and dismay that one experiences in front of shelves stocked with olive oil. Extra virgin, virgin, pure, cold-pressed, Italian, Greek, Californian—which is best? And what about all those reports of fake or adulterated olive oils, and corruption in the industry? It’s like showing up to class and realizing there was a quiz.
There is a particular feeling of panic and dismay that one experiences in front of shelves stocked with olive oil. Extra virgin, virgin, pure, cold-pressed, Italian, Greek, Californian—which is best? And what about all those reports of fake or adulterated olive oils, and corruption in the industry? It’s like showing up to class and realizing there was a quiz.
If these terms seem confusing and arbitrary, it’s because they often are. Even those in the industry agree: The CEO of the world’s largest olive oil company made this point to his competitors recently, arguing that something needs to change.
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“Consumption is falling because consumers have a lack of confidence and they don’t trust anything,” Deoleo head Pierluigi Tosato said, according to the Olive Oil Times. “Olive oil is a broken business model. We need to change it.”
Beyond the packaging, the business of producing, importing, and exporting olive oil has long been rife with deception and fraud. Every few years another ring of olive oil fraudsters is uncovered—just last year Italian police busted a scheme to export impure, lower-grade olive oil and sell it as top-tier extra virgin olive oil in New Jersey, part of Italy’s nearly $17 billion business in illegal agriculture.
But there are safeguards in place: North American Olive Oil Association executive director Joseph R. Profaci told Quartz in an email that his organization sends an average of 200 different olive oil samples per year to independent testing labs, and has found that 98% is authentic olive oil.
Olive oil scams are profitable because making it right is really hard. The olives should be ground and pressed as soon after harvesting as possible, and the process has to be gentle—because friction raises the temperature of the olive pulp, which is bad for the flavor. That’s the big deal about cold-pressed olives, which have to be kept below a temperature of 27°C (80.6°F) to earn the label.
Then the oil is separated from the pulp by soaking and pressing fiber discs or decanting it in a centrifuge. Once it’s been pressed, the oil is ready to be tasted for quality. Most olive for mass consumption is then filtered, meaning much of the sediment is stripped away to create a clear oil.
While extra virgin, virgin, and pure might all sound like similar (and good) things, they’re actually wildly different.
There are four main kinds of virgin olive oil, according to the International Olive Council standards. The difference is in their levels of free fatty acid, a compound that correlates to the condition of the olives when they’re crushed. Damaged, old, or overheated olives will be high in oleic acid, which makes a lower-grade oil.
Olive oil is also judged by a sensory taste test, where experts screen for defects like being “grubby,” which is what happens when the olives were crushed with the larvae of the olive fly inside. (This is more likely in rainy seasons, which is just one of the ways climate change is wreaking havoc on the industry.)
As with wine, whiskey, and coffee, there’s a set of best practices for tasting olive oil. Nicholas Coleman, the co-founder and oleologist of the boutique olive oil subscription service Grove and Vine, broke them down for Quartz:
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the kind of olive oil being illegally imported to the US, the scope of the illegal importing ring, and the phrasing used by olive oil manufacturers to hide olives’ true point of origin.
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