`Olive Oil Industry Moves to Oppose Proposed FDA Front-of-Pack Label - Olive Oil Times
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Olive Oil Industry Moves to Oppose Proposed FDA Front-of-Pack Label

By Daniel Dawson
Jul. 25, 2025 15:06 UTC
Summary Summary

Stakeholders in the olive oil indus­try are oppos­ing the FDA’s pro­posed front-of-pack nutri­tion label, argu­ing that it will con­fuse con­sumers and unfairly cat­e­go­rize olive oil. The FDA’s pro­posed label would cat­e­go­rize olive oil as medium in sat­u­rated fat con­tent, which has led to crit­i­cism and calls for a dif­fer­ent approach to pro­vid­ing nutri­tion infor­ma­tion on food pack­ag­ing.

Olive oil indus­try stake­hold­ers are push­ing back against the United States Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) pro­posed front-of-pack nutri­tion label.

The FDA, which announced the pro­posed rule in January, said the label would take the form of a nutri­tion infor­ma­tion box, pro­vid­ing con­sumers ​“read­ily vis­i­ble infor­ma­tion about a food’s sat­u­rated fat, sodium and added sug­ars con­tent — three nutri­ents directly linked with chronic dis­eases when con­sumed in excess.”

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The nutri­tion infor­ma­tion box will be divided into three columns, detail­ing the nutri­ent, the per­cent of daily value, and whether this value is low, medium, or high. 

Food defined as ​“low” in a spe­cific nutri­ent will con­tain less than five per­cent of its daily value. ​“Medium” foods will have between six and 19 per­cent of the daily value of the nutri­ent, and foods with more than 20 per­cent of the daily value will be marked as ​“high.”

Olive oil, a serv­ing of which con­tains about ten per­cent of the daily value of sat­u­rated fat, would fall into the medium cat­e­gory, along with pop­u­lar brands of ultra-processed snack foods, such as Doritos and Pringles. Meanwhile, other ultra-processed foods, includ­ing Oreos and Funyuns, would qual­ify as ​“low” in sat­u­rated fat.

A sample of the FDA’s proposed front-of-pack label (Photo: FDA)

Joseph R. Profaci, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the North American Olive Oil Association, whose 60 mem­bers rep­re­sent an esti­mated 70 per­cent of United States olive oil sales, lamented the deci­sion and is call­ing on the FDA to with­draw the pro­posed front-of-pack label.

“The NAOOA opposes the pro­posed FOP [front-of-pack label] rule as writ­ten because it will send con­fus­ing and con­flict­ing mes­sages to con­sumers with respect to olive oil labels,” he wrote in a pub­lic com­ment to the FDA, which was seen by Olive Oil Times.

While the NAOOA stated that it agreed in prin­ci­ple to pro­vid­ing nutri­tion infor­ma­tion to help con­sumers make healthy deci­sions, Profaci warned that cat­e­go­riz­ing foods based on a sin­gle nutri­ent was a step back­ward.

Instead, he praised a pre­vi­ous ini­tia­tive by the FDA that allowed health claims on foods to help con­sumers fol­low a healthy dietary pat­tern based on cur­rent nutri­tion sci­ence. 

The FDA cited olive oil as an exam­ple of a food that was pre­vi­ously excluded from receiv­ing a ​“healthy” claim but now meets the new cri­te­ria, as its sat­u­rated fat con­tent is below 20 per­cent of the daily value.

“This is why the NAOOA was dis­ap­pointed to see that under the pro­posed FOP rule, FDA has reverted to the dis­cred­ited one-size-fits-all approach of the 1990s by requir­ing an across-the-board def­i­n­i­tion of what con­sti­tutes low, medium and high con­tent of the ref­er­ence nutri­ents,” Profaci wrote.

The NAOOA fur­ther crit­i­cized the appli­ca­tion of the rule to fats and oils, say­ing it made no sense for olive oil pro­duc­ers and sell­ers to list sugar or sodium con­tent. However, the NAOOA added that an exemp­tion for sin­gle-ingre­di­ent foods would also be an unsat­is­fac­tory out­come.

“The FOP box should instead only pro­vide infor­ma­tion on the spe­cific nutri­ents that are rel­e­vant to the food group to which a food belongs,” Profaci wrote.

“A con­sumer look­ing to pur­chase a cook­ing oil to include as part of their diet would ben­e­fit at the point of deci­sion if they could com­pare the rel­e­vant nutri­ent con­tent among the avail­able options, e.g. olive oil or corn oil — not by com­par­ing the nutri­ent con­tent of the cook­ing oil to a food in a dif­fer­ent group, such as lemon­ade,” he added.

The NAOOA warned that the ​“healthy” claim cur­rently per­mit­ted on labels, com­bined with a ​“medium” rat­ing for sat­u­rated fat con­tent, may con­fuse con­sumers.

Instead, the NAOOA rec­om­mended hav­ing dif­fer­ent front-of-pack labels for spe­cific food groups, such as one for fats and oils that lists the con­tent of sat­u­rated fat, trans fat, cho­les­terol, and oleic acid to help con­sumers make more informed deci­sions, or scrap­ping the idea alto­gether and com­ing up with a dif­fer­ent type of label.

Along with the NAOOA, the California Olive Oil Council and American Olive Oil Producer Association are expected to sub­mit com­ments in oppo­si­tion to the label­ing scheme. To date, the FDA has received over 11,000 com­ments on the label­ing scheme.

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