`3,200 Gallons of Untraceable Olive Oil Confiscated in Tuscany - Olive Oil Times

3,200 Gallons of Untraceable Olive Oil Confiscated in Tuscany

By Marco Marino
Dec. 3, 2014 10:55 UTC
Officers of the Italian State Forestry Corps inspect a truck from Foggia, in Apulia in an effort to clamp down on fraud.

In the mid­dle of the night on November 14, in Siena, the Italian State Forestry Corps (CFS) seized a truck car­ry­ing 3,200 gal­lons of olive oil with doc­u­men­ta­tion stat­ing Extra Virgin Olive Oil — 100% Italian — 2014 – 2015 Harvest.“

The load came from Foggia, in Apulia, but it was not accom­pa­nied by the required doc­u­men­ta­tion indi­cat­ing the ori­gin and pro­ducor of oil. Once arrived, it would prob­a­bly have been bot­tled as Tuscan olive oil while hav­ing other ori­gins.

There were also incon­sis­ten­cies between the ship­men­t’s des­ti­na­tion on the trans­port doc­u­ment and the real route of the truck as recorded by the tacho­graph. The truck had trav­eled for four days with­out a clear des­ti­na­tion before being stopped by the offi­cers near the Bettolle motor­way exit, reports said, head­ing toward a well-known Tuscan olive oil pro­ducer. The lat­ter said he did not have any busi­ness rela­tions with the sup­plier from Foggia.

The cir­cum­stances lead the Forestry Corps to con­fis­cate the olive oil load, as a pre­cau­tion­ary mea­sure, and to pour it into two tanks pro­vided by an oil pro­ducer from Montepulciano.

Chemical-phys­i­cal analy­ses mea­sur­ing the alkyl esters have revealed that the olive oil was of good qual­ity and orig­i­nated from Apulian groves.

An offi­cial state­ment by the State Forestry Corps said they are mon­i­tor­ing the han­dling of olive and olive oil ship­ments through­out Tuscany to pre­vent, and pos­si­bly pun­ish, frauds against con­sumers and mar­ket reg­u­lar­ity.

Controls are espe­cially impor­tant in a year like 2014, char­ac­ter­ized by a short­age of oil due to poor cli­mate con­di­tions and the olive fly.


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