An International Survey on Olive Oils Quality and Traceability: Opinions from the Involved Actors

Abstract

A survey was launched to understand the current problems and sensitivities of the olive oil market through a series of questions clustered around topics related to quality, traceability, regulation, standard methods and other issues. The questions were selected after a series of interviews with different actors to identify those aspects where some disagreement or different points of view may exist. These questions were grouped in topics such as geographical traceability, consumer perception and quality management. The survey was addressed to eight different olive oil actors independently: producers, retailers, importers, exporters, analysts, workers at regulatory bodies, and consumers. Approximately half of the respondents (67.0% for consumers and 56.0% for the rest of olive oil actors) claimed to understand the importance of the protected designation of origin. In fact, the traceability objectives that were selected as the most relevant were those related with geographical traceability (19.3%) followed by the detection of adulteration (15.6%). Most of the respondents (80%) would agree to share data for a common database; however, some concerns exist about the use of these data and the issue of paying to have access to this database. The respondents mostly expressed an affirmative answer concerning the efficiency of panel test (74%) and a negative answer (90%) concerning the proposal of removing from regulation, although 42% agree with their revision for improvement. The opinions on "best before" date and their relationship with quality and the willingness to apply non-targeted methods were also surveyed.

Keywords: best before; olive oil; protected designation of origin; quality; sensory assessment; survey; traceability.

Figure 1

Percentages of the answers (1576) given by farmers/producers, consumers, analysts and regulatory bodies to the eight following questions: (A) detection of pesticides and other contaminants; (B) geographical identification (identification of production areas); (C) detection of critical points affecting to quality; (D) reproducibility in the production between crops and extraction systems; (E) detection of critical points affecting safety; (F) detection of adulteration of olive oil; (G) prediction of protection designation of origin (PDO); and (H) additional guarantee of the product to gain consumer confidence (competitive product differentiation).