Results of Quality Testing Initiative Lead North American Trade Group to Take Legal Action

Summary

The North American Olive Oil Association plans to take legal action against two olive oil brands found to be adul­ter­ated dur­ing recent qual­ity test­ing. Despite some sam­ples fail­ing purity and qual­ity para­me­ters, the study showed that less than one per­cent of olive oil sam­ples were adul­ter­ated, with the major­ity meet­ing the grade for extra vir­gin.

The North American Olive Oil Association (NAOOA) has announced that it will take legal action against two olive oil and one extra-vir­gin olive oil brands that were found to be adul­ter­ated dur­ing a recent qual­ity test­ing ini­tia­tive in the United States and Canada.

One so-called extra vir­gin olive oil sam­ple from a pro­pri­etary brand with a 0.15 per­cent mar­ket share failed five purity para­me­ters, includ­ing bras­si­cas­t­erol, campes­terol, bet­a­sitos­terol, delta‑7 Stigmastenol, and stig­mas­ta­di­enes.

Another so-called refined olive oil sam­ple from a pro­pri­etary brand with 0.36 per­cent mar­ket share failed two qual­ity para­me­ters, includ­ing ery­thro­diol plus uvaol and waxes.

NAOOA Executive Director Joseph R. Profaci declined to iden­tify the two brands, cit­ing the organization’s impend­ing legal actions, but said the sam­ple labeled as extra vir­gin was being sold at 50 per­cent below aver­age sales prices.

Tassos C. Kyriakides, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of bio­sta­tis­tics at the Yale University School of Public Health, who the NAOOA retained to design and over­see the study, con­firmed to Olive Oil Times that results from test­ing by an inde­pen­dent International Olive Council (IOC)-approved lab­o­ra­tory based in Spain showed val­ues for the two sam­ples were incon­sis­tent with the purity stan­dards, indi­cat­ing adul­ter­ation. 

However, he could not pro­vide the iden­tity of the adul­ter­ants, as it falls out­side his area of exper­tise and the scope of the report, adding that this deter­mi­na­tion would need to be made by indi­vid­u­als with chem­i­cal knowl­edge and exper­tise.

Despite these find­ings, Profaci and oth­ers in the indus­try said the results of the dou­ble-blind study (Kyriakides and lab­o­ra­tory are not aware of the source of the oils), which was funded by the NAOOA but car­ried out inde­pen­dently, showed that con­sumer fear of wide­spread fraud fol­low­ing con­sec­u­tive poor har­vests in the Mediterranean basin was unfounded.

“We found less than one per­cent of adul­ter­ation based on chem­i­cal purity para­me­ters,” Kyriakides said, includ­ing no adul­ter­ation in sam­ples of olive oil and extra vir­gin olive oil rep­re­sent­ing the top 15 pro­pri­etary brands, which make up 85 per­cent of the mar­ket, and pri­vate-label brands. 

Along with purity test­ing, which checks whether the olive oil was mixed with other oils or sub­stances, the NAOOA also tasked Kyriakides with test­ing for qual­ity, ensur­ing the prod­uct met the grade for extra vir­gin.

Overall, Kyriakides tested 216 sam­ples from pro­pri­etary brands and pri­vate label brands, includ­ing 153 prod­ucts from the top 15 pro­pri­etary brands sold in the U.S. and Canada, which make up 85 per­cent of the mar­ket, as well as 37 pri­vate label brands and 26 pro­pri­etary brands from the bot­tom 15 per­cent of the mar­ket. 

Only the afore­men­tioned two sam­ples, which came from the last group, were deter­mined to be adul­ter­ated. Meanwhile, 18 olive oil sam­ples labeled as extra vir­gin, 11 per­cent of the total, were found not to meet the grade.

According to International Olive Council data, the U.S. has con­sumed approx­i­mately 389,200 met­ric tons of olive oil annu­ally over the past five years.

While a 2019 study from Pew Research found that a major­ity of Americans are skep­ti­cal of indus­try-funded research, Alexandra Kicenik Devarenne, a California-based expert and direc­tor of the Extra Virgin Alliance spe­cialty sec­tion of the NAOOA, pointed out that although it is not ideal, there would be vir­tu­ally no research into the U.S. olive oil mar­ket with­out indus­try-funded stud­ies. 

This con­trasts sharply with the European Union, which is respon­si­ble for more than half of global olive oil pro­duc­tion and funds sig­nif­i­cant sci­en­tific and mar­ket research efforts. 

Devarenne told Olive Oil Times that although any adul­ter­ation is clearly unac­cept­able, the results of the study indi­cate that ​“the aver­age American consumer’s chances of get­ting a bot­tle of adul­ter­ated olive oil would be worked out to maybe one bot­tle in a life­time – and they would have to be buy­ing cheap off-brand prod­ucts.” 

Kyriakides said the study fol­lowed stan­dard sam­pling method­ol­ogy, using syn­di­cated olive oil con­sumer data to ensure that the sam­pling for the top 85 per­cent was also rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the geo­graph­i­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion across the U.S. and Canada. NAOOA retained another firm to locate and buy these sam­ples.

“My goal was to cre­ate bins [of olive oil and extra vir­gin olive oil sam­ples] that were bal­anced, reflect­ing the mar­ket,” he said. “ Put another way, if I’m a con­sumer and I go out there in any region, what is the prob­a­bil­ity of me pick­ing up oil X from this com­pany, this pro­ducer, this coun­try or ori­gin or this cost?”

After com­plet­ing the pur­chases, the sam­pling agency sent the olive oil and extra vir­gin olive oil sam­ples to another inde­pen­dent lab­o­ra­tory ser­vice agency. This agency decanted the oils into unmarked vials and sent them to an inde­pen­dent lab­o­ra­tory for purity test­ing. 

From there, the sam­ples were sent on to IOC-approved tast­ing pan­els for organolep­tic assess­ment, also located in Spain. 

Kyriakides then received data from the lab in Spain, ana­lyzed it, drafted the report and sent it to the NAOOA. An inde­pen­dent third party holds the infor­ma­tion to help iden­tify the brands for any fur­ther action, as decided by the NAOOA.

However, skep­tics of the study indi­cated that the least trans­par­ent seg­ments of the sec­tor were under­rep­re­sented in the test­ing. 

The pri­vate label brands made up less than 15 per­cent of the sam­ple, while syn­di­cated data indi­cate that they account for 40 per­cent of the mar­ket share. Additionally, no whole­sale sam­ples were taken.

According to Profaci, ​“there is no require­ment for pri­vate label com­pa­nies to dis­close their pack­ers, except for those pri­vate label brands that use the NAOOA cer­ti­fied seal, in which dis­clo­sure to us is manda­tory.”

“Regarding whole­salers, we did a sam­pling from cash and carry loca­tions, but the sam­ple size was too small and not rep­re­sen­ta­tive, and so although Kyriakides pro­vided us with data, he did not report on it,” Profaci added. 

“We did not attempt to test oils in the bou­tique shops or even super­mar­kets that may be sell­ing oils bot­tled-to-order,” he con­tin­ued. ​“That could cer­tainly be some­thing we con­sider in the future, although a good per­cent­age of those oils tend to be fla­vored, and that will mask sen­sory and even some chem­i­cal defects.”

While acknowl­edg­ing the lim­ited num­ber of pri­vate-label brands tested, Profaci and Kyriakides stated that the deci­sion to select a lim­ited num­ber of these sam­ples was based on syn­di­cated mar­ket research data indi­cat­ing that approx­i­mately ten pro­duc­ers are respon­si­ble for vir­tu­ally all pri­vate-label oils in the U.S.

“Other fac­tors that went into this deci­sion are that some of these pri­vate label sup­pli­ers are also among the top 15 brands being tested,” Profaci added. ​“Also, the very large vol­umes involved in doing busi­ness with retail pri­vate label com­pa­nies (e.g., Costco), and the risk of sub­stan­tial legal expo­sure, are also impor­tant fac­tors that deter any bad actors.”

Skeptics also noted that 11 per­cent of extra-vir­gin olive oil sam­ples failed to meet the stan­dards for the grade, which was another alarm­ing find­ing. 

While Kyriakides said deter­min­ing the cause or nature of the defects was out­side the scope of what he was retained to do, Profaci said the NAOOA’s qual­ity con­trol unit dug deeper into the data and found indi­ca­tions that many of the instances of defects prob­a­bly occurred post-pro­duc­tion.

“Pouring over the data that accom­pa­nied Kyriakides’ report, our qual­ity con­trol com­mit­tee noticed that with the excep­tion of a few sam­ples, what the data show are signs of recent oxi­da­tion, specif­i­cally, show­ing up in K232 and ran­cid­ity defects, and not in mark­ers that typ­i­cally show sec­ondary oxi­da­tion prod­ucts (e.g., K270),” he said. 

“The fact that the oxi­da­tion is recent points to the post-pur­chase han­dling as a likely cause of the defects, poten­tially along with recent han­dling in the sup­ply chain by dis­trib­u­tors and retail­ers and, depend­ing on when the oils were shipped, by the pro­duc­ers,” he added. ​“And it points away from spec­u­la­tion that the pro­duc­ers were inten­tion­ally pack­ing tired oils.”

Along with test­ing for qual­ity defects, the study also exam­ined the fatty acid com­po­si­tion and phe­no­lic com­pound con­tent of a sub­set of extra vir­gin olive oil sam­ples to assess their healthy attrib­utes.

The study found that the aver­age monoun­sat­u­rated fatty acid con­tent per two table­spoons of tested olive oil was 18.7 grams, exceed­ing the 17.5‑gram thresh­old set by the Food and Drug Administration for a qual­i­fied health claim. Only 13.5 per­cent of the oils tested in the sub­set fell below the health claim thresh­old.

Additionally, the study found that the aver­age phe­no­lic con­tent of the sub­set of tested oils was 273.6 mil­ligrams per kilo­gram, exceed­ing the 250 mil­ligrams per kilo­gram thresh­old for a qual­i­fied health claim set out by the European Food Safety Agency. (The FDA does not have a sim­i­lar qual­i­fied health claim for phe­no­lic com­pounds.)

While he acknowl­edged that there should be con­cern about any amount of adul­ter­ation in the mar­ket, Profaci stated that the study’s results were over­whelm­ingly pos­i­tive. 

Even though other U.S.-based experts agreed with Profaci, some skep­tics argued that sup­ply chain delays are com­mon and that olive oils being shipped across the Atlantic from Europe or South America, or across the coun­try from California, should be able to with­stand set­backs in the sup­ply chain.

However, Profaci said that the high-qual­ity results pro­vide the indus­try with an oppor­tu­nity to dis­cuss best prac­tices for han­dling and trans­porta­tion with sup­ply chain stake­hold­ers and retail­ers to pre­serve qual­ity.

He also hopes the results will help counter disin­gen­u­ous claims made by some in the indus­try regard­ing the qual­ity of imported olive oil or, indeed, their com­peti­tors’ olive oil. 

“Among the disin­gen­u­ous claims we often hear is that if an oil is packed in a PET bot­tle, or not from a sin­gle ori­gin, it will likely be fake or not have any health ben­e­fits,” Profaci said. ​“From the study results, it’s clear that pretty much all of the extra vir­gin olive oils tested, many of which were in plas­tic and from mul­ti­ple ori­gins, sat­is­fied all purity para­me­ters and met the qual­i­fi­ca­tions for mak­ing health claims on two para­me­ters (oleic acid and phe­nol com­pound con­tent).” 

“Ironically, we know from the data accom­pa­ny­ing the report that the two lesser-known brands that were found to be ​‘fake’ were labeled as ​‘sin­gle-ori­gin’ and nei­ther one was packed in plas­tic,” he added.