Italy’s Organic Food Market Nears €7 Billion as Demand Outpaces Supply

Summary

The organic food mar­ket in Italy was val­ued at €6.9 bil­lion in 2025, with exports reach­ing €3.9 bil­lion in 2024. Despite ris­ing aware­ness, there is an infor­ma­tion gap and price remains a cen­tral hur­dle for pro­duc­ers and retail­ers, with organic olive oil sales account­ing for 5.7 per­cent of extra vir­gin olive oil sales in large retail.

The value of the organic food mar­ket in Italy reached €6.9 bil­lion in 2025, a 6.2 per­cent increase com­pared to 2024, accord­ing to the lat­est SANA Food/Nomisma report. Exports of Italian organic food rose 174 per­cent over the last decade, reach­ing €3.9 bil­lion in 2024.

Organic con­sump­tion out­side the home is also expand­ing. Spending in bars, restau­rants and other non-domes­tic set­tings now rep­re­sents 20 per­cent of the sector’s total value, with extra vir­gin olive oil among the organic ingre­di­ents most com­monly used in out-of-home din­ing.

At the house­hold level, large retail­ers account for about 64 per­cent of organic food sales. Specialized organic-only retail­ers rep­re­sent 20 per­cent of sales and posted 7.5 per­cent year-over-year growth.

In mod­ern large retail, organic prod­ucts con­tin­ued to out­per­form the broader food mar­ket in 2025, increas­ing 4.9 per­cent in value com­pared to 2.9 per­cent for the total food mar­ket. Organic vol­umes rose 3.6 per­cent, ver­sus 0.8 per­cent over­all.

Even so, only 25 per­cent of retail­ers expanded their organic assort­ments by at least 2 per­cent. The report sug­gests growth is being dri­ven more by faster turnover and wider con­sumer pen­e­tra­tion than by mean­ing­ful increases in shelf space.

The report found that most con­sumers buy organic because they see it as a health-boost­ing, eth­i­cal and sus­tain­able choice. Bars and restau­rants, mean­while, are more likely to buy organic to posi­tion their offer as pre­mium and appeal to cus­tomers seek­ing health­ier, more sus­tain­able options.

However, the same analy­sis high­lights a per­sis­tent infor­ma­tion gap. About 75 per­cent of bars and restau­rants said they lack suf­fi­cient details about organic prod­ucts, includ­ing their ori­gin, pro­duc­tion meth­ods, and impacts on the envi­ron­ment, human, and ani­mal health.

That gap appears to shape how organic is pre­sented to din­ers. While 86 per­cent of bars and restau­rants said they use at least one organic ingre­di­ent, it is often not com­mu­ni­cated to the pub­lic, includ­ing on menus.

Rising aware­ness also does not always trans­late into pur­chases, even for sta­ples such as extra vir­gin olive oil.

“Organic olive oil is still a niche, and the real issue is edu­ca­tion. Many con­sumers don’t fully under­stand what organic truly means, or why it costs more,” Stefano Zenezini, co-owner of the organic, multi-awarded Le Clarisse, told Olive Oil Times.

“Some peo­ple say organic should be priced less, because it means you do less in the field… In real­ity, organic means you do more,” he added, cit­ing repeated kaolin treat­ments after rain, hand prun­ing and efforts to avoid soil com­paction, as well as cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and admin­is­tra­tive costs and lower yields linked to early har­vest and organic prac­tices. ​“Organic high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil, full of polyphe­nols and deli­cious, is math­e­mat­i­cally more expen­sive.”

According to the report, organic prod­ucts — espe­cially olive oil, wine, pasta and toma­toes — are increas­ingly shap­ing Italian fam­i­lies’ choices. In 2025, 93 per­cent of Italy’s 24 mil­lion fam­i­lies bought organic food at least once, up from 53 per­cent in 2014.

Regular pur­chas­ing remains more con­cen­trated. Slightly more than half of fam­i­lies buy organic food rou­tinely, and about 66 per­cent of sales are made by just 20 per­cent of house­holds.

Within olive oil, the report esti­mates that organic accounts for 5.7 per­cent of extra vir­gin olive oil sales. In large retail alone, organic extra vir­gin olive oil sales totaled €70.5 mil­lion in 2025.

Price remains a cen­tral hur­dle for pro­duc­ers and retail­ers. Organic food prices are per­ceived as ​“high” by 64 per­cent of bar and restau­rant own­ers, and many oper­a­tors said it can be dif­fi­cult to explain the prac­ti­cal dif­fer­ences between con­ven­tional and organic prod­ucts.

“For us, organic is not a mar­ket­ing choice. It is a prin­ci­ple,” Zenezini said. ​“Olive oil is some­thing you use every sin­gle day, sev­eral times a day. It has to be good for you, not just good in taste.”

He added that con­sis­tent com­mu­ni­ca­tion helps build trust. ​“Eighty per­cent of our oil is pre-sold. People trust us because they know the olives come only from our farm, and because we never com­pro­mise on how we pro­duce,” he said.

The report also flagged com­pe­ti­tion from ​“Km 0” offers, a pop­u­lar short­hand for local foods. Some oper­a­tors said it can be dif­fi­cult to com­mu­ni­cate the value of non-local organic prod­ucts to cus­tomers who pri­or­i­tize prox­im­ity.

FederBio, the asso­ci­a­tion of organic food pro­duc­ers, said the edu­ca­tional gap could be addressed in part by the pro­posed​“Organic Made in Italy” seal. If adopted, sup­port­ers say the label could link cer­ti­fied sus­tain­abil­ity with local bio­di­ver­sity and tra­di­tional prod­ucts while boost­ing trust, trace­abil­ity and recog­ni­tion of Italian organic food.

Maria Grazia Mammucchini, pres­i­dent of FederBio, said cul­ti­vated organic areas and con­sump­tion are expand­ing, point­ing to a sec­tor in good health. However, she warned that demand is now grow­ing faster than pro­duc­tion and should be mon­i­tored to ensure growth cre­ates value for domes­tic pro­duc­ers rather than increas­ing imports.

For Zenezini, organic farm­ing is ulti­mately about stew­ard­ship rather than trend-fol­low­ing. ​“We are not here just to pro­duce olive oil for one sea­son,” he said. ​“We are stew­ards of our olive grove. It was here before us and it will be here after us. Organic farm­ing is part of that respon­si­bil­ity — to leave the land bet­ter than we found it and to pass it on to the next gen­er­a­tion.”

Looking more broadly, he said he sees a new gen­er­a­tion push­ing the shift for­ward. ​“Across Europe I see many young farm­ers who gen­uinely want to pro­duce food that is good for peo­ple and good for the envi­ron­ment,” Zenezini con­cluded. ​“There is a very advanced cul­ture grow­ing around this, but it requires edu­ca­tion, coher­ence and the courage to value qual­ity prop­erly.”