When it comes to the World Olive Oil Competition, my thinking has always been to recognize and celebrate every producer who manages to achieve outstanding quality.

That's why I decided years ago to do away with the Best in Class award, saying at the time, "Crafting a high-quality olive oil is an arduous task. Every producer who manages to do so deserves to be recognized without unjustified hierarchies."

The notion that an oil that received a score of 96 by a panel of judges is better than an oil that scored a 94 is nonsense. Sensory analysis is the best way to record how an oil tastes at the time, but it's an imperfect metric.

I know that a panel can score an oil a 78, and then 82 a few hours later. As I explained in announcing my decision back then, "even the line between ‘good’ and ‘great’ can be fuzzy."

Over the years, we led the way in providing value to all producers of quality. Back when competitions did nothing more than post their list of winners in a PDF, we built an online guide with original product images, profiles, links to producers' websites, retail locator, pairing app and tourism finder. Among the winning brands, we never surmise that one is better than another.

At some point, we noticed a few producers posting that their brands were declared the "best in the world" by someone whose business plan was apparently to tally the results from olive oil competitions around the world and order them according to how many awards they won in all. So producers who could afford to enter a dozen competitions were top ranked, while those with smaller marketing budgets were sidelined.

The point, it seemed to me at the time, was to sell stickers. Ugly "World's Best EVOO" stickers doled out by some guy in Germany with a calculator. I moved on.

Then another guy in butter country, this time the Netherlands I think, started his own ranking (like all industries, ours is rife with plagiarists who can't think for themselves) with another clunky website, ugly sticker, and the divine name EVOOWR.

Web analytics tools revealed that the two sites were getting almost zero traffic, which made sense. Why would consumers be drawn to hollow, homely, aggregated lists of olive oil brands?

One of these tallymen asked in an email for a spreadsheet of our results to make his job easier (no). The other decided one day to cut back on the contests he had to compute by excluding some based on whether the judging was in-person or done remotely.

And yet, to my dismay, I saw at least one competition organizer boasting that their contest was among the ones included in these armchair "world rankings" – rankings that penalized smaller producers, attracted no consumer interest and were based on arbitrary criteria. It was all nonsense.

Something had to be done.

I decided to let my technical team loose on building a ranking system done our way. It highlights consistent excellence, supports producers of all sizes and introduces an array of innovations designed to enlighten consumers on the value of high-quality extra virgin olive oils.

The Olive Oil Times World Ranking→

Every producer's page includes a complete record of achievements, links to their websites and social channels, product images and press coverage. More than 1,500 producers are indexed, updated in real time as the World Olive Oil Competition results are certified.

I didn't want to do it. And yet, when the objective is not to sell stickers, but instead to boost all producers of excellence and educate the public using a transparent methodology, it aligns with our values.

Readers seem to like it – more than a million have checked out the platform so far. They're using the AI image search function to see if products they see at the store are vetted; learning about quality criteria, cultivars and defects; and they're clicking through to producers' websites to find more about the people behind the winning brands.

It's a new way to present the mountain of data from the world's largest annual quality assessment of olive oil brands. The best way, however, to truly rank one olive oil over another is to ask, "Which one would you like to enjoy right now?"