`Notes from Stockholm - Olive Oil Times
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Notes from Stockholm

By Vincenza Ferrara
Nov. 26, 2013 11:45 UTC

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Thanks to the European Union Program ​“Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs,” a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of DORA Farm — which man­ages an olive grove and a small mill in Sicily — has been spend­ing 6 months in Stockholm with a ​“host entre­pre­neur” to learn more about the Swedish and Scandinavian food mar­ket and develop a new busi­ness strat­egy.

After a month of work­ing in Sweden and ana­lyz­ing not only the food mar­ket but, above all, the dietary habits of Northern Europeans, you can eas­ily draw the con­clu­sion that one of the first actions to be done here is a good dietary edu­ca­tion cam­paign.

But the phe­nom­e­non is more com­plex than it may appear.

Claiming the need for a dietary cam­paign to raise the aware­ness of extra vir­gin olive oil does not mean that Danes, Swedes, Finnish or Norwegian peo­ple do not know the prod­uct at all, or its ben­e­fits.

On the con­trary, extra vir­gin olive oil is appre­ci­ated here — you can eas­ily find it at the super­mar­ket and north­ern peo­ple seem to be deeply inter­ested in the prod­uct — but it is not really known yet.

There is a whole set of fea­tures about extra vir­gin olive oil that north­ern peo­ple should gain, like how to rec­og­nize a good extra vir­gin from a bad one, to appre­ci­ate its taste char­ac­ter­is­tics, to learn which is the best way to use and store it and a real under­stand­ing of its healthy ben­e­fits.

The Mediterranean diet and lifestyle is still con­sid­ered the best one here, how­ever sev­eral myths and mis­in­for­ma­tion are com­mon, and they are pre­vent­ing extra vir­gin olive oil from gain­ing the proper recog­ni­tion it deserves.

Dietary edu­ca­tion activ­i­ties and cam­paigns should be designed, devel­oped and imple­mented in part­ner­ship with pub­lic bod­ies and olive oil pro­duc­ers for the ben­e­fit of every­one in south­ern and north­ern coun­tries.

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