Italy Expands Olive Oil Controls After Inspections

Italian authorities announced an intensification of inspections across the olive oil supply chain after a short, targeted operation uncovered significant irregularities, including lampante oil marketed as extra virgin and hundreds of tons of product lacking adequate documentation.

Achieving full traceability through blockchain or another system would be the way to avoid these crises.– Tommaso Battista, president, Copagri farmers’ association

During the first two weeks of July, the Central Inspectorate for Quality Protection and Fraud Repression of Agri-Food Products (ICQRF) carried out 167 checks involving 108 operators. Inspectors found 17 operators to be non-compliant and issued 30 citations.

Inspectors collected 68 samples for specialized analysis and checked more than five million kilograms of olive oil. The operation resulted in seizures valued at €10.3 million.

Among the most significant findings were 30 tons of oil marketed as extra virgin that laboratory analyses classified as lampante, a category unfit for direct human consumption without refining.

Officials also temporarily blocked 350 tons of oil held without adequate accounting records establishing its origin. A further 270 liters were seized for improperly evoking a protected geographical indication.

Some of the findings led to ongoing criminal investigations.

At the meeting where the figures were presented, Italian Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida announced a broader offensive against olive oil fraud.

The ministry said the initiative would include more joint inspections at production facilities, trading companies, large retailers and ports, along with increased sampling and closer cooperation among ICQRF, customs officials and public health laboratories.

Authorities also intend to increase the use of physicochemical, organoleptic, pesticide-residue, molecular and isotopic testing.

According to the ministry, olive oil inspections increased by 21.1 percent between 2023 and 2025, when more than 7,200 inspections were conducted. Nearly 2,500 focused specifically on products labeled as 100 percent Italian extra virgin olive oil.

Farm organizations welcomed the additional controls but argued that inspections alone cannot resolve weaknesses in the system for tracing olive oil from its source to the final consumer.

“Italy’s olive oil traceability system falls short,” Tommaso Battista, president of the farmers’ association Copagri, told Olive Oil Times.

Battista said large quantities of foreign olive oil still enter Italy without being analyzed upon arrival.

“Once it has reached its destination, unfortunately, we have long known that so-called magic operations take place that transform olive oil into extra virgin,” he said. “Obviously, it is a matter of chemistry. This is nothing new. It is an old story. In such cases, olive oil becomes extra virgin through chemical operations.”

To counter such practices, Copagri is proposing a digital passport that would accompany every shipment of olive oil destined for Italy, beginning in the exporting country.

The electronic record would identify the oil’s origin and category and include relevant analyses before the shipment entered the country. The same information would then follow the lot through processing, storage and packaging.

Copagri has proposed using blockchain technology or another digital system to create and maintain the passport throughout the supply chain.

According to Battista, a barcode or similar code on the bottle could eventually allow consumers to identify the oil’s origin and potentially where the olives were harvested.

“That means that when the shipment reaches the packaging center, no alteration can occur,” Battista said. “No magic can turn an olive oil that is not extra virgin into extra virgin, or make an olive oil that is not Italian become Italian.”

One crucial step, according to several farming organizations, would be to shorten the time allowed for recording olive oil transactions in Italy’s National Agricultural Information System, known as SIAN.

Current rules require that olive traders must record purchases and subsequent transfers in the SIAN electronic register, including the time of each transaction.

The olives must be delivered to a mill, and the corresponding records completed, within six hours of their acquisition by the first trader.

The requirement applies to transactions between growers and traders, between different traders and from traders to mills. Farming organizations are calling for the same principle of timely recording to be applied more broadly to olive oil after milling.

They argue that faster, more consistent recording after milling would allow authorities to compare imports, inventories, mill records and subsequent transactions in near real time.

This could make unexplained discrepancies easier to detect before the product moves further along the supply chain.

Coldiretti has advanced a closely aligned set of proposals to strengthen the traceability framework. The farmers’ association wants public databases to be made interoperable, beginning with customs data.

The organization has also called on authorities to cross-reference price information with traceability records, making it easier to identify anomalies involving market prices, product origin, recorded quantities and movements through the supply chain.

Coldiretti has requested increased staffing at ports and border crossings, as well as greater use of nuclear magnetic resonance and isotopic mapping. It has argued that these analytical tools should be recognized as valid evidence in judicial proceedings.

“By aligning the databases of the Customs Agency and the fraud-control authorities with the records of Italian farms, we would be able to keep the entire system under control,” David Granieri, president of the olive growers’ association Unaprol and vice president of Coldiretti, told Olive Oil Times.

Granieri called for a European Union-wide system modeled on SIAN that would align information held by customs authorities and ICQRF with farm records and company inventories.

He said the latest ICQRF data demonstrated the value of targeted inspections.

“If you look, you find,” Granieri said, pointing specifically to the discovery of lampante oil marketed as extra virgin.

He argued that imported lampante olive oil requires closer monitoring because it is not suitable for direct consumption. Inadequate tracking of its subsequent movements, he added, may create significant opportunities for fraud.

At the European level, Coldiretti is calling for changes to customs rules under which a food product may be considered to originate in the country where its last substantial processing occurred, even when the raw material came from elsewhere.

The organization argues that food products should instead retain a clearer link to the origin of their agricultural raw materials.

Battista rejected the idea that the additional costs of a digital traceability system would necessarily make it impractical.

While some expenses could fall on the sector, he said cooperatives, mills and bottlers increasingly recognize that demonstrable quality and origin provide added value in export markets.

Battista cited his cooperative’s growing supply agreement in Abu Dhabi, where each shipment is sampled upon arrival, and the results are compared with the analytical certificate provided by the exporter.

“If abroad they increasingly favor quality, achieving full traceability through blockchain or another system would be the way to avoid these crises,” he said.

Battista also linked more reliable traceability to the widening price differences consumers encounter at retail.

He said low-priced bottles may legitimately contain blends of olive oils from different European Union countries. However, he argued that consumers need clearer tools to distinguish them from Italian extra virgin olive oils with documented origin and production records, which he said involve substantially higher production costs.

When different products carry the same extra virgin designation, he added, many consumers understandably choose the least expensive bottle. Better traceability, alongside consumer education, could make differences in origin and production more visible.

Alongside its initiative to strengthen controls and traceability, the government has launched a promotional campaign that has been broadcast on Rai television and radio since July 11.

In recent years, olive oil producer associations have repeatedly called for national communication campaigns to raise consumer awareness of olive oil’s health benefits and its role as a staple of Italian cuisine.

The latest campaign encourages consumers to look beyond price alone and pay closer attention to where olive oil comes from, how it is produced and what the label reveals about its quality.