Olive oil's slippery supply line Italian extra-virgin not always real thing
By KIMBERLY LORD STEWART
Special to The Denver Post

Sunday, October 26, 2003 - Extra-virgin olive oil has earned the trust of consumers looking for better health and a full-flavored oil, but increased global competition allegedly tempts some producers to adulterate and mislabel their products in pursuit of profit.

Consumers may think their oil comes from Italy or that it is made using the best methods possible, but the oil might not be from the region the label indicates. Worse yet, it could be diluted with another oil.

The majority of the world's bulk olive oil flows through Italian ports. Once in the country, extra-virgin oils from Italy, Greece, Spain, Tunisia and Turkey are blended, bottled, labeled and shipped across the globe.

International and FDA laws require olive oil bottlers to say exactly where the olives are grown, but many suppliers do not abide by them.

To the consumer, "Packed in Italy" or "Imported from Italy" is enough assurance that the oil is 100 percent Italian, even though in reality the olives may have never touched Italian soil.

This is exactly what some olive oil companies are counting on. The reason for the deception is that among consumers worldwide, Italy holds the reputation as producing the highest quality olive oil. In truth, other Mediterranean countries and the United States produce equally good oil, but extra-virgin olive oils believed to be Italian can command a 20 percent higher price tag than others.

At present consumers are at the mercy of their retailer to know exactly what they are buying. Albert Katz, president of the California Olive Oil Association in Berkeley, says that until consumers start asking their retailer questions, nothing will change.

Industry experts say the problem is that many American food companies naively rely on overseas suppliers to label their products for import into the United States. But they fall victim to an international industry eager to be a part of the $400 million American olive oil market, which has grown 54 percent the past eight years.

"It's complicated," says Mick Laurita, owner of Denver-based food purveyor Italco. "The more you learn about olive oil, the less you know."

Laurita has bought and sold olive oil for at least 20 years. During that time the laws governing labeling and quality control have not kept pace with alleged industry schemes.

In fact, USDA regulations were last updated in 1948, when Harry S. Truman was president and Frank Sinatra crooned on the radio. The classifications use outdated terms like "fancy" and "choice" grade instead of accepted jargon such as extra-virgin and pure olive oil.

What is 'extra-virgin'?

At the pinnacle of the olive-oil industry sits extra-virgin olive oil, the gold standard. Only olives picked fresh and slightly unripe, pressed within 24 hours of harvest, and carefully monitored to meet the growing, harvesting and pressing standards set by the International Olive Oil Council in Madrid, Spain, will bear the name extra-virgin.

Within the extra-virgin category, there are different levels of virtue and perfection - similar to those of wine - ranging from small-estate produced oils to large conglomerate-owned oil companies that typically blend extra-virgin olive oil from Italy, Tunisia, Turkey, Spain and Greece.

Extra-virgin is followed by good, but not quite flawless, virgin olive oil. The third category is pure olive oil or light olive oil, a heat-refined olive oil blended with an unregulated amount of extra-virgin or virgin oil.

Even further refining, with chemical solvents, produces inedible crude pomace oil, used for manufacturing. The oil is refined again with steam to remove any impurities and then blended with 10 to 20 percent extra-virgin olive oil to create olive-pomace oil, used by some caterers and restaurants.

Laurita wishes olive-pomace oil was off the American market because after the chemical refining it has virtually no resemblance to the original product's culinary and health attributes.

"In Italy and Greece, people float a wick in it and use it for a night light," he says.

For consumers looking for flavorful oil as well as a healthy one, extra-virgin oil is the best choice. Unlike pure olive oil and light olive oil, in which most of the nutrients have been refined out, extra-virgin olive oil contains all the original health properties found in the whole olive fruit.

Cardiovascular-research studies consistently show that extra-virgin olive oil contributes to better heart health because the monounsaturated fats lower bad-cholesterol levels (LDL) and the linoleic acid helps metabolize cholesterol.

First signs of trouble

The evidence of a troubled industry came in 1996, when the Food and Drug Administration reported that a majority of olive oil tested was not 100 percent olive oil, but instead seed oils or blended oils. Since then, the deception has declined, but detection is more difficult and requires tireless detective work.

European Union government scrutiny includes highly skilled scientists and testing laboratories, satellites that monitor olive oil groves and mandatory daily reports from olive oil companies caught cheating.

Is it all olive?

The newest scheme involves cutting olive oil with poor-quality hazelnut oil. According to EU commission reports, customs officials became suspicious when bulk hazelnut oil entered EU ports, but there were no records of any finished product containing hazelnut oil. But officials discovered that awareness was easy, detection difficult. In levels of 5 percent or less, hazelnut oil adulteration is virtually undetectable, even in the best labs.

Industry experts from the EU and Canada estimate that the worldwide hazelnut adulteration rate ranges from 3 percent to nearly 9 percent, down from 44 percent in 1998.

The North American Olive Oil Association in Neptune, N.J., a monitoring and marketing association for North American imported oils, periodically tests bottles but has no figures to quantify the amount of adulterated oil that reaches consumers.

In the past five years, the FDA has prosecuted a handful of violators but largely relies on the association and each state to monitor its suppliers. A more prevalent problem, but one that's equally difficult to detect, is the blending of various olive oil grades and labeling them extra-virgin.

Modern machinery makes better oils but also helps unethical producers blend just the right amount of extra-virgin olive oil with refined olive oil, creating oil that analytically resembles pure extra-virgin olive oil but may not have the same health properties or taste characteristics found in true extra-virgin olive oil.

"Mixing non-olive oil with olive oil, pomace oil (chemically refined oil) with virgin oils and refined oil with virgin oil is all legal and ethical as long as it is indicated as to what it is on the label," said Paul Vossen, olive oil expert at the University of California extension office in Davis, Calif.

"The real problem is that manipulated oils are sometimes sold for more money and labeled as extra-virgin or as virgin oils when they are not."

Bertolli, the world's largest olive oil producer and owner of 40 percent of the U.S. market, became the example of accountability and mislabeling in 1998, when the New York law firm Rabin and Peckel filed a class-action suit in the New York Supreme Court against Unilever, the English-Dutch maker of Bertolli Olive Oil.

The suit said that Bertolli's labels, which said "Imported from Italy," did not meet full disclosure laws because most of the olive oil came from Tunisia, Turkey, Spain and/or Greece.

"Bertolli brand olive oil is imported from Italy, but contains no measurable quantity of Italian olive oil," stated court documents. Marvin Frank, legal counsel for the plaintiff, said that consumers had the right to know if they are buying 100 percent Italian olive oil.

Bertolli admitted no wrongdoing in the case, but in 2001, a conciliatory olive branch between parties settled the case, requiring labels to indicate where the oils originated.

White lies in labeling are not unique to imported oils. As the California olive oil industry has grown from winery-owned boutique businesses into a legitimate industry, producers report the same unethical practices seeping into California olive oil.

"Some believe that in order to survive in this industry, you have to check your morals at the door," said Jamie Johansson, owner of Lodestar Farms olive oil and wholesale olive supplier in Oroville, Calif.

He said some olive oil producers blend California-grown extra-virgin olive oil with imported extra-virgin olive oil, and label the product as 100 percent Californian.

"It's like selling California peaches and saying they're from Colorado," he said.

In response to the problems, the California Olive Oil Council recently passed an ethics policy for its members, requiring them to abide by California labeling laws and strict production guidelines.

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