World Competition Wins Bring Relief to Southern Cone Producers

Summary

Producers in South America’s Southern Cone faced chal­lenges dur­ing the 2024 har­vest but still man­aged to craft award-win­ning qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil, with Chilean pro­duc­ers expe­ri­enc­ing a 30 per­cent pro­duc­tion decline. Despite the dif­fi­cul­ties, pro­duc­ers like Alonso Olive Oil and Deleyda cel­e­brated mul­ti­ple Gold and Silver Awards at the 2024 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, show­cas­ing their com­mit­ment to high-qual­ity pro­duc­tion and inno­v­a­tive strate­gies to over­come weather-related chal­lenges.

Producers across South America’s Southern Cone over­came chal­leng­ing har­vests and, in some cases, soar­ing pro­duc­tion costs to craft award-win­ning qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil.

Farmers and millers from Argentina, Chile and Uruguay com­bined to win 12 awards from 20 entries at the 2024 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition​’s Southern Hemisphere divi­sion.

Chilean pro­duc­ers, who expe­ri­enced a 30 per­cent pro­duc­tion decline in 2024, yielded 15,000 met­ric tons of olive oil after a har­vest marred by extreme weather and an ​‘off-year. ’

Three farm­ers and millers from Chile com­bined to earn five Gold and two Silver Awards at the com­pe­ti­tion.

Long-time entrant and win­ner Alonso Olive Oil cel­e­brated a record year, earn­ing four Gold Awards for an early har­vest Coratina, a medium-inten­sity Coratina, a Picual and a medium blend.

“It is a source of pride for the entire Alonso team to have obtained four Gold Awards this year, which con­firms the effort and ded­i­ca­tion we have main­tained over time,” said José Manuel Reyes, Alonso Olive Oil’s com­mer­cial man­ager. ​“These awards moti­vate us to con­tinue focus­ing on high-qual­ity pro­duc­tion.”

“In addi­tion, the con­sis­tency in our work is a tes­ta­ment to our com­mit­ment,” he added. ​“A good exam­ple is our Coratina, which has received the Gold Award for the past five years, reit­er­at­ing our goal as pro­duc­ers.”

Similarly to other pro­duc­ers in Chile, Alonso Olive Oil endured heavy rain and frost, which Manuel Reyes said could have impacted the qual­ity by delay­ing the har­vest.

“However, we man­aged the tim­ing effi­ciently, min­i­miz­ing any neg­a­tive impact,” he said. ​“Thanks to this, we achieved an excel­lent per­for­mance in this cam­paign.”

“Aware of the chang­ing cli­mate that we are fac­ing, this year we decided to bring for­ward the start of the har­vest to the first weeks of April, with the aim of plan­ning a har­vest that would allow us to antic­i­pate pos­si­ble adverse weather events,” Manuel Reyes added.

He said the com­pa­ny’s con­sis­tent suc­cess in the World Competition has improved brand aware­ness glob­ally and serves as an annual qual­ity bench­mark for the entire pro­duc­tion team.

“There is no doubt about the pres­tige of the NYIOOC world­wide, and being the most awarded Chilean oil over the years has given us global recog­ni­tion,” Manuel Reyes said.

Nearby, the pro­ducer behind Olivos de Ruta del Sol cel­e­brated earn­ing Gold and Silver Awards for a medium and del­i­cate blend, respec­tively, bot­tled under the Deleyda brand.

“We are very happy and hon­ored with this award, a com­pe­ti­tion in which we have par­tic­i­pated for the sixth time and have obtained six Gold Awards with our Deleyda Premium and Deleyda Fine Selection,” chief exec­u­tive Fernando Carrasco Spano said.

Situated 150 kilo­me­ters south of Santiago, the mul­ti­ple NYIOOC win­ner expe­ri­enced a mild pro­duc­tion drop, par­tic­u­larly not­ing the low oil accu­mu­la­tion lev­els in the olives, which can make high-qual­ity milling a chal­lenge.

“To ensure qual­ity, we have an early har­vest strat­egy look­ing for olives at an early point of ripeness, where the olives max­i­mize their poten­tial for aro­mas and fla­vors,” Carrasco Spano said.

“We under­stand that this search for qual­ity goes in the oppo­site direc­tion of max­i­miz­ing per­for­mance, but at Deleyda, we are com­mit­ted to achiev­ing the dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing aro­mas and expe­ri­ences for which we have been awarded over the years,” he added.

Carrasco Spano said that win­ning at the World Competition is an impor­tant qual­ity marker for con­sumers, pro­vid­ing annual evi­dence that the com­pany has fol­lowed the best prac­tices nec­es­sary to pro­duce a high-qual­ity prod­uct.

MORE Chile, sit­u­ated in the Atacama Desert in the coun­try’s north, was the third Chilean medal­ist, earn­ing a Silver Award for a del­i­cate Frantoio.

On the other side of the Andes, two pro­duc­ers from wine-soaked Mendoza, Argentina, cel­e­brated their Gold Awards at the 2024 NYIOOC.

Olivares de Don Ignacio earned a Gold Award for its Patagonia Gourmet Blend, a medium-inten­sity blend of Arbequina, Arauco and Frantoio olives bot­tled with a Mendoza PGI cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

Miguel Zuccardi, head of olive oil pro­duc­tion at Familia Zuccardi, was the country’s other win­ner. The com­pany earned a Gold Award for an organic medium Arauco, sub­mit­ted to the com­pe­ti­tion by Manicaretti Italian Food Importers.

“We are very happy to obtain this recog­ni­tion at NYIOOC,” Zuccardi said. ​“We believe it is good to bring the oils from our region to pres­ti­gious com­pe­ti­tions like this one and, above all, to spread our Arauco vari­ety, which has a rich his­tory in our region.”

“Although it is a vari­ety mainly intended for the pro­duc­tion of table olives, from the begin­ning of our project, we chose it and risked launch­ing the first sin­gle-vari­etal oil from Argentina pro­duced with the Arauco vari­ety,” he added. ​“It is a vari­ety with very good pro­duc­tiv­ity, so its cul­ti­va­tion has been main­tained for more than four cen­turies.”

The award is a relief for the Zuccardi fam­ily after win­ter frost dam­aged the trees before they blos­somed. Combined with an ​‘off-year,’ this resulted in a ​“rather low” har­vest in 2024.

“This year, we opted for a greater pro­por­tion of man­ual har­vests to speed up the pace of har­vest­ing and guar­an­tee the fruit’s integrity,” Zuccardi said. ​“In a year, with less fruit on the trees, ripen­ing is accel­er­ated, and we opted to con­cen­trate the har­vest in a shorter time.”

“At an indus­trial level, we are apply­ing improve­ments that allow us to take bet­ter care of the oil extrac­tion process each year,” he added. ​“This is about con­tin­u­ous improve­ment and every year, we focus on inno­vat­ing the indus­trial aspects that favor main­tain­ing the fresh aro­mas and fla­vors of the recently har­vested olives and pre­serv­ing the antiox­i­dant com­pounds in the oil.”

Zuccardi hopes this NYIOOC award will help the com­pany expand its mar­ket share in the United States.

Along with farm­ers and millers in Argentina and Chile, Uruguay’s two largest olive oil-pro­duc­ing com­pa­nies com­bined to earn three awards at the World Competition.

Maldonado-based Agrolandia earned Gold and Silver Awards for its medium blends, Corte Italiano and Bivarietal, bot­tled under the Colinas de Garzón brands.

Meanwhile, in neigh­bor­ing Rocha, Nuevo Manantial earned a Silver Award for its Olivares de Rocha brand, a del­i­cate blend.

“For us, this recog­ni­tion is very impor­tant,” said María José Morín, the mar­ket­ing man­ager for both com­pa­nies. ​“Especially in this very par­tic­u­lar year, it is like an encour­age­ment, an incen­tive for the whole team that has suf­fered a lot with every­thing that was the har­vest loss.”

While offi­cial data have not been pub­lished yet, many in Uruguay antic­i­pate a sig­nif­i­cant pro­duc­tion decline due to two years of his­toric drought fol­lowed by rain dur­ing the har­vest.

“The awards give us strength and encour­age­ment to con­tinue, know­ing that good work is always rec­og­nized in the face of adver­sity,” Morín said.

She added that the awards are expected to help both com­pa­nies increase their exports to Brazil and the United States.

“Especially for the United States, the awards help us greatly because they open doors,” she said, point­ing out that an award from a U.S.-based com­pe­ti­tion demon­strates qual­ity to local dis­trib­u­tors and importers in a way that awards from else­where may not.

While it is still too early to fore­cast the 2025 har­vest in the Southern Hemisphere, pro­duc­ers across the Southern Cone reported abun­dant flow­er­ing and are opti­mistic.

“The trees are beau­ti­ful with many flow­ers, but we must see how the fruit devel­ops,” Morín said. ​“There seems to be a fore­cast of a very good har­vest, but we must wait and see.”

In Argentina, where pro­duc­tion fell from a record-high 40,000 tons in 2023 to about one-third of that in 2024, Zuccardi antic­i­pates a pro­duc­tion rebound for 2025.

“The spring that is begin­ning presents a more abun­dant flow­er­ing that we hope will come to fruition,” he con­cluded. Luckily, we have had a good win­ter with good snow­fall in the Andes moun­tain range, which is deci­sive in water avail­abil­ity and aquifers recharg­ing in desert regions such as Mendoza.”