Industry News

Testing by a NSW laboratory has found some bottles of extra virgin olive oil, sold in US supermarkets, are in fact half canola oil. Adjunct Professor with Australian Oils Research, Rod Mailer, says the testing had to be done at Wagga Wagga because the US didn’t have the right equipment. He says Australia has seen very similar contamination in olive oil imported from Europe. Dr Mailer says that, in two tests, the laboratory found up to 75% of the oil sent from the US would not have passed IOC standards.

Spanish researchers have developed a cheap, portable ‘electronic nose’ they say has great promise for use in organoleptic testing and food quality control. While so-called e-noses themselves are not new, the University of Extremadura Sensory Systems Research Group says its system reduces the time and cost of testing. In a recent press release, researcher Jesus Lozano said that the new system – which mimics the human nose – could not only deliver quantitative results in a minute, it cost ten times less than existing methods to set up.

In a breakthrough, scientists have claimed successful cultivation of olive trees, a prized Mediterranean produce, for the first time in Kashmir, owing to favorable weather conditions there. Scientists and researchers at Central Institute of Temperate Horticulture (CITH) have grown olive trees in its farms, where the project to study the behavior of olive trees in the local climatic conditions has been underway since 2008.

Record olive oil production in Spain – already at 1.56 million tons by the end of February – leads the March market newsletter from the International Olive Council (IOC). Quoting figures from the Agencia para el Aceite de Oliva (Olive Oil Agency), the IOC highlights that this is well above the previous record of 1.41 million tons in 2003/04. The table olive harvest, meanwhile, is down 14% on last season, with just 519,310 tons so far netted.

Olive oil prices fell to a nine- year low on record production in Spain and rising stocks, combined with lower domestic consumption, Oil World reported. Spanish olive-oil production in 2011-12 is forecast to rise to 1.56 million metric tons from 1.38 million tons a year earlier, the Hamburg-based oilseed researcher wrote in a report. “Producers are now claiming that in many cases prices have fallen below production costs,” Oil World wrote. “Domestic consumption of olive oil apparently declined so far this season as a result of the economic crisis and increased availability of attractively priced sunflower oil.”

On April 10 Chile Oliva, the Chilean Association of Growers and Producers of Olives and Olive Oil, launches its first consumer campaign in the U.S., which asks the question “How Virgin is Your Extra Virgin?” The mission of the campaign is to expand the position of Chilean extra virgin olive oil into new markets, with a focus on New York, Miami and Boston. The campaign was created by Vivaldi Partners Group, a global brand strategy and marketing consulting firm.