Slick Extra Virgin

The number one principle that anyone concerned with producing or using quality extra virgin olive oil should adhere to is – completely ignore the standards set by the International Olive Council (IOC) for what can be called extra virgin olive oil (EVOO).

No, not because they are hard to meet. Quite the contrary. They are so loose that just about any poorly made, picked up off the ground, fermented pile of junk can be made into an olive oil that meets the international standard and therefore can legitimately be labeled as extra virgin. And you guessed it – they usually end up in a local American, Australian or Canadian supermarket (probably) near you. Mumbai and Shanghai are destined to be next.

But surely the international standards must guarantee that olive oils labeled as EVOO are reasonably good? Well no they don’t, and the reason is simple. $$

Oil producers can cheaply purchase, or accept, poor quality diseased olives, process them into oil weeks after they were harvested (therefore avoiding investment in expensive processing infrastructure), buy in oils for blending that were made years ago (at bargain basement prices of course) etc etc. But despite all this, once made and blended, the end result may be an oil that still meets the standards for EVOO set by the IOC.

So let’s start with the two most well known and applied standards. 1) free fatty acidity (or acidity). FFA is a general indicator of the health of the olives, and how quickly the olives were processed into oil, and 2) the peroxide value (or PV) which gives an idea of the oxidative state of new oils, which in turn gives a good idea as to their potential life. In both cases the lower the value the better.

The IOC standard for EVOO is (less than) 0.8% for free fatty acidity and (less than) 20 meq/kg for peroxide value.

I’ll tell you right now….. Any olive oil with that sort of chemistry is complete and absolute junk. I know it, ‘they’ know it, and everyone else in the olive business knows it.

Those ‘compliant’ IOC standards are exactly what ‘they’ need for sub-standard olive oils to continue to show up on your supermarket shelf labelled as EVOO. Most quality producers (big and small) want only healthy and great tasting olive oil to be labeled extra virgin olive oil. They reject the international standards for what they are, but then again many would argue that the IOC is not there to protect the interests of small producers.

So what is a really good extra virgin olive oil? The chemistry of an oil tells you a lot about its provenance. Things like how good the olives were, how carefully the oil was made, and how well it was stored.

All I can tell you is what I think the ‘average chemistry’ is. You can work out the rest for yourself. But what is average? To answer it I’ve used data taken from various sources within the Australian Olive oil industry. This is a pretty coordinated industry that undertakes best industry practice. It is the norm to use disease free olives (there is no olive fly in Australia), harvest quickly and process olives into oils expeditiously (lots of machine harvesting goes on). There are very few mat presses with modern 2 phase extraction technology being the norm. The Australians do a lot of analysis of their oils, and as a result I’ve been privileged to obtain some big data sets to show current benchmarks. While I’m Australian myself, I’m sure that other new world producers who have the same industry demographics would return similar results. It’s just that the Australians test a lot of oils because of the existence of a few excellent and cost effective laboratories headed by some excellent scientists.

It’s also worth noting that the oils represented by this data come from an incredibly wide range of climatic conditions – from very warm and humid climates dominated by summer rainfall, through to classic ‘Mediterranean’ climates, to cold marginal climates where olives struggle to ripen. While the climatic conditions under which the olives are grown don’t affect the acidity or peroxide value, the oils would have been grown and made by a very large number of different processors. So all in all, they are a pretty representative lot.

So here are the averages, with the corresponding IOC limits. I’ve seen quite a few confidential analysis of Australian supermarket oils from the Mediterranean in the past and have put in a typical range value for comparison as well. ok, the range given is my personal observation, but when the importers publish their analysis (if indeed they have any) I’ll be happy to stand corrected.

* Commercial EVOO’s submitted to 2005-2008 Australian National Extra Virgin Olive Oil Show. (unpublished).  # Australian oils submitted to the NSW Department of Primary Industries oil testing laboratory (2005-2006). Source Mailer (2007) na – peroxide value is only a legitimate measure of the oxidative state of new seasons oils. Most supermarket oils are blends of various years.

Summary

The average of free acidity of commercially available EVOO’s is more than 4 times lower than the IOC limit. Even the oil at the highest 25% mark was more than 3 times lower than the IOC limit.

The Australian average of Peroxide value is less than half the IOC limit. It is worth noting that the difference between the average 9 meq/kg and the IOC limit of 20 meq/kg  PV’s is huge. To illustrate this, only 8 of the 1800 Australian olive oils submitted to the NSW Department of Primary Industries Laboratory were higher than the IOC limit of 20 meq/kg (Mailer 2007).

So don’t worry about what the IOC limits are. They’re just there to protect big commercial interests and old world ways of thinking about the bounds of what constitutes extra virgin olive oil quality. The rest of the EVOO producing world (with a care factor greater than zero) has moved on.

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