`When it Comes to Olive Oil Consumption, Turkey Lags Behind Other Big Producers - Olive Oil Times

When it Comes to Olive Oil Consumption, Turkey Lags Behind Other Big Producers

By Vikas Vij
Sep. 4, 2012 07:38 UTC

Turkey is the world’s fourth largest pro­ducer of olive oil, with an aver­age share of global pro­duc­tion between 7 and 10 per­cent. The Aegean region is home to about 76 per­cent of the country’s 85 mil­lion olive trees. However, when it comes to per capita con­sump­tion of olive oil, Turkey is far behind the other major olive oil pro­duc­ing coun­tries.

Spain, Italy and Greece con­sume around 10 kilo­grams, 12 kilo­grams and 25 kilo­grams of olive oil per capita per annum respec­tively. In sharp con­trast, Turkey con­sumes barely one kilo­gram indi­cat­ing the need to cre­ate an effec­tive mar­ket­ing and aware­ness cam­paign in Turkey to pro­mote olive oil.

Turkish con­sumers are slowly mak­ing a shift to olive oil due to an increased aware­ness about its health ben­e­fits but, accord­ing to Metin Olken, the pres­i­dent of Olive Oil Promotion Committee in Turkey, the coun­try has a long way to go in terms of improv­ing con­sump­tion, and seri­ous mar­ket­ing efforts are required to spur the demand for olive oil.

Olken points out that the wide preva­lence of unbranded olive oil in the Turkish mar­ket makes it dif­fi­cult to make a cor­rect assess­ment of the country’s olive oil con­sump­tion. The coastal regions of Turkey have tra­di­tion­ally been bet­ter con­sumers of olive oil, but now the con­sump­tion lev­els are grad­u­ally ris­ing in the inte­rior regions such as Anatolia as well.



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