Deoleo North America CEO Says Sustainability is Key to Growing Olive Oil Sector

More than one-quar­ter of the extra vir­gin olive oil sold by Deoleo in 2023 was sourced from olive farm­ers and mills fol­low­ing sus­tain­able best prac­tices, accord­ing to the company’s first inte­grated sus­tain­abil­ity report.

“Sustainability is part of our strat­egy and our pur­pose,” Thierry Moyroud, Deoleo North America’s chief exec­u­tive, told Olive Oil Times. ​“Our goal is to reach more than 70 per­cent of all our oils being sus­tain­ably sourced in the future.”

The report, audited by Deloitte, con­cluded that 27.7 per­cent of the company’s extra vir­gin olive oil comes from inde­pen­dently cer­ti­fied third-party farm­ers and millers fol­low­ing sus­tain­able best prac­tices.

The report also found that the world’s largest seller of branded olive oil, which includes the Bertolli and Carapelli brands, has elim­i­nated the gen­der pay gap at the com­pany and increased the num­ber of bot­tles made from 100 per­cent recy­cled plas­tic by 7.4 per­cent.

Moyroud said the report had been in the works since the com­pany under­took its first mate­ri­al­ity assess­ment in 2020. It was pub­lished one year before the European Union said it would imple­ment manda­tory envi­ron­men­tal, social and gov­er­nance (ESG) report­ing stan­dards.

“It is our com­mit­ment to the cat­e­gory to be its stew­ards,” he said. ​“If we are to do that seri­ously, we think sus­tain­abil­ity should be at the cen­ter of every­thing we do; it is a key piece of what should be expected from our indus­try.”

For Deoleo, sus­tain­abil­ity includes min­i­mal use of phy­tosan­i­tary prod­ucts in the olive groves, effi­cient use of water resources, pro­mot­ing energy effi­ciency across the farm­ing and milling processes, man­ag­ing the soil as a liv­ing sys­tem, pro­mot­ing bio­di­ver­sity in the groves and min­i­miz­ing waste dur­ing the pro­duc­tion process.

“It’s a broad and holis­tic approach to iden­ti­fy­ing the para­me­ters influ­enc­ing the pro­duc­tion of olive oil and the crit­i­cal ones where we need to improve over time if we want to pro­mote healthy and sus­tain­able olive oil pro­duc­tion,” Moyroud said.

While the com­pany con­tin­ues to lean into its sus­tain­abil­ity strat­egy and mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, Moyroud empha­sized that qual­ity comes first.

Like many in the sec­tor, the last two years of poor har­vests and ris­ing pro­duc­tion costs have been quite chal­leng­ing for the Córdoba-based multi­na­tional, which sources extra vir­gin olive oil from Spain, Italy, Portugal, Tunisia, Greece and Argentina.

“What we are look­ing for is qual­ity oil, first and fore­most,” Moyroud said. ​“During some years, we can com­bine qual­ity with sus­tain­able sources; in other years, we have to pri­or­i­tize qual­ity.”

Another con­se­quence of con­sec­u­tive poor har­vests in Spain and across the Mediterranean basin has been record-high prices at ori­gin.

According to Infaoliva, extra vir­gin olive oil prices in Spain sit at €7.80 per kilo­gram at the time of writ­ing, well below the mid-January record high of €8.988 but still 27 per­cent above the same time last year.

“If the last two years have taught me any­thing in this indus­try, it is to be very hum­ble in our pre­dic­tions and spec­u­la­tion because nobody expected what hap­pened last year,” Moyroud said. ​“The mar­ket sit­u­a­tion con­tin­ues to be uncer­tain and com­plex.”

While prices fell sub­stan­tially at the begin­ning of April, drop­ping to €7.00 per kilo­gram, with the news that Spain’s har­vest exceeded ini­tial expec­ta­tions, they have con­tin­ued to climb.

Even so, the country’s main olive-grow­ing region looks promis­ing, with a sig­nif­i­cant fruit set and an absence of the high tem­per­a­tures that neg­a­tively impacted the two pre­vi­ous har­vests in Andalusia.

“The first infor­ma­tion we have about the new har­vest is pos­i­tive,” Moyroud con­firmed. ​“The fruit blos­som­ing is good. The water reserves are above aver­age for this time of the year. These fac­tors sup­port a pro­jec­tion that the 2024/25 crop year will return to nor­mal lev­els.”

In the five years before the his­tor­i­cally poor 2022/23 crop year, Spain pro­duced an aver­age of 1.4 mil­lion tons of olive oil annu­ally. Close sec­tor observers believe this pro­duc­tion level could result in prices drop­ping to between €3 and €4 per kilo­gram.

While Moyroud does not see the need to spec­u­late about future prices, he thinks the past two years have been a wake-up call for the sec­tor about the impacts of cli­mate change in the Mediterranean basin, which is respon­si­ble for more than 95 per­cent of global olive oil pro­duc­tion.

Similarly to Jaime Lillo, the International Olive Council’s exec­u­tive direc­tor, Moyroud believes the sec­tor’s future involves sig­nif­i­cant expan­sion in non­tra­di­tional olive-grow­ing regions.

“[The two bad har­vests and record high prices at ori­gin are] a sig­nal that the sec­tor needs a pro­found trans­for­ma­tion,” he said. ​“It’s a good sig­nal being sent to the mar­ket that we need to rethink how we oper­ate as an indus­try.”

Moyroud said Deoleo is work­ing to expand its global approach to sourc­ing olive oil. He pointed to Argentina — already the largest pro­ducer out­side of the Mediterranean basin — as a coun­try with immense poten­tial to expand high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil pro­duc­tion. ​“Quality can­not be linked to any spe­cific ori­gin,” he added.

Moyroud said part of Deoleo’s suc­cess in a wide range of non-tra­di­tional olive oil mar­kets is iden­ti­fy­ing taste pro­files and con­sis­tently deliv­er­ing extra vir­gin olive oil that meets these pro­files, which often includes blend­ing oils from dif­fer­ent sources.

“For instance, in the U.S., peo­ple like much milder olive oil,” Moyroud said. ​“So, we define a taste pro­file for Bertolli in the U.S., which is not the taste pro­file for Bertolli in Germany.”

“To reach this taste pro­file, we some­times use dif­fer­ent blends to achieve the same result. That’s where we are strong,” he added. ​“To do that, it does­n’t mat­ter where the olive oil comes from, but it mat­ters what qual­ity olive oil you can find.”

While ensur­ing a con­sis­tent and sus­tain­ably pro­duced sup­ply of extra vir­gin olive oil is one of Deoleo’s most press­ing chal­lenges, the other is increas­ing con­sump­tion in places such as the United States, which over­took Spain last year as the world’s sec­ond-largest con­sumer.

In his six years at the helm of Deoleo North America, Moyroud said the most sig­nif­i­cant change he has seen is the growth of the retail mar­ket in the U.S. since the onset of the Covid-19 pan­demic in early 2020.

At the peak of lock­downs, an esti­mated 94 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion was in a juris­dic­tion with manda­tory stay-at-home orders in the U.S. Many were cook­ing at home and needed more cook­ing fat, includ­ing olive oil.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, olive oil imports rose from 339,200 tons in 2019 to 402,600 tons in 2020, and this trend has con­tin­ued. The U.S. imported an aver­age of 322,150 tons annu­ally from 2016 to 2019. In the four years since the pan­demic started, this fig­ure has risen to 387,575 tons.

“We retained a sig­nif­i­cant part of this increase,” Moyroud said. ​“The mar­ket has gone down since 2020, undoubt­edly because peo­ple returned to restau­rants. But at the end of the day, we have seen more pen­e­tra­tion than before.”

“That is not the case in many geo­gra­phies,” he added. ​“In many places, the mar­ket has returned to what it was before the pan­demic.”

Moyroud believes the sec­tor must cap­i­tal­ize on the pan­demic’s cook­ing-at-home expe­ri­ence and expand olive oil’s share in the total edi­ble oil cat­e­gory, which cur­rently is about three per­cent.

“I’m more look­ing towards a place where olive oil will be cen­ter stage in the kitchen,” Moyroud said. ​“I don’t want to lean too much on the very high-end part of the olive oil cat­e­gory where we tend to look like the wine cat­e­gory. That’s a bit of an elit­ist approach.”

“I’m more focused on how we can bring the beauty of our cat­e­gory into every­day use in all American kitchens, which is not the case in many house­holds today,” he added. ​“It’s a prod­uct for the masses, not a prod­uct for the very few.”

Returning to the sig­nif­i­cance of Deolo’s sus­tain­abil­ity report, Moyroud said the sec­tor must focus on edu­cat­ing the pub­lic about olive oil’s envi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fits and health ben­e­fits com­pared to all other edi­ble fats.

“Today’s con­ver­sa­tions are about processed foods and how to eat less of them,” he said. ​“Tell me some­thing less processed than olive oil. It’s very hard to find one, and we some­times for­get that.”

To that end, Moyroud plans to con­tinue pro­mot­ing olive oil as a healthy and con­sci­en­tious alter­na­tive to other edi­ble fats. He believes this will con­tinue expand­ing Deoleo’s house­hold pen­e­tra­tion in the U.S., dri­ving con­sump­tion.

“Very sim­ply, we are at 55 per­cent pen­e­tra­tion, so we still have 45 per­cent of house­holds to reach,” he con­cluded.