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."

Rest assured the reason I haven't posted lately is that I've had nothing even remotely interesting to say. I still might not.

But I've been thinking about generative AI and how Chat GPT and others to come might affect my job and yours.

I don't know if you've been playing around with the tool that some very smart people say will transform the way we live and work. I've probably asked it a few dozen questions since I signed in for the first time last month. My kids have dabbled with its essay-writing acumen – just for fun, of course.

Last week I received an invitation from the Oleocanthal Society of Spain to attend a conference in Malaga next summer.

I probably receive twenty proposals a year to attend such gatherings of researchers, usually with airfare and expense accommodations. I almost never go.

Once in a while, I’ll open the conference program attached to the invitation to find that I’m already listed as a speaker on the schedule. And this is from scientists whose job is to establish facts.

This one is called “Second Health Matters Convention on EVOO, Phenols, Fatty Acids and the Mediterranean Diet.” It might not be the most compelling title, but the hotel looks fine.

I get it that researchers have grant money they need to spend, and a few days of roundtable discussions on the Costa del Sol is bound to yield scientific breakthroughs, but I’ll be passing on this one, too.

The conference coincides with a competition called the “The World’s Best Healthy EVOO Contest” -- another showstopper of a title.

The contest ranks entries based on their content of “biophenols, oleocanthal and fatty acids,” according to their website, in contrast to the taste tests by sensory experts employed by most international competitions, including the NYIOOC.

While an international team of judges were analyzing around 1,200 samples for the World Olive Oil Competition last month, there were experts in Italy conducting a taste test of their own.

Italian Police Seize €170,000 of Mislabeled Olive Oil

Italian authorities said they prevented 2.3 million liters of virgin and refined olive oils labeled as extra virgin from entering the market.

Olive Oil TimesOOT Staff

The Finance Police investigated 183 olive oil importers and distributors to see if products they marketed as extra virgin olive oil were indeed just that.

It turned out that 27 percent of the samples they collected weren't extra virgin after all. More than two million liters of mislabeled products were prevented from reaching the market to be bought by unknowing consumers.

For its part, the Italian farmers' group Coldiretti offered a reminder that more than 540,000 tons of olive oil were imported into Italy last year. Since the country consumes around the same amount as it produces domestically, that leaves around a half million tons that are bottled and bounced to foreign markets.

The group warned citizens to read labels, but acknowledged the challenge in doing so: "On extra virgin olive oil bottles coming from abroad, in most cases, it is almost impossible to read the mandatory declarations," Coldiretti noted, "because they are written in very small characters, placed on the back of the bottle and in a position on the labels which is hard to spot."

But blaming it on imports is a smokescreen. It's true that the generations-old practice of smacking an Italian (or Californian) flag on oils from other regions is deceptive and wrong, but Coldiretti knows the fault lies with bad actors, not bad origins. We know there are great oils crafted in Spain, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco and every other producing country.

We've seen this before.

In 2012, the Los Angeles International Olive Oil Competition was the largest olive oil quality contest around, with some 400 entries.

The annual results were uploaded to the organization’s website on a static PDF. There was no information about the producers, no links to the winners’ websites, no educational content. And it hasn’t changed since.

I thought it could be done better so, in 2013, we held the first NYIOOC at the International Culinary Center in New York with 702 entries – the most ever for an olive oil competition.

From the start, the aim was to recognize, celebrate and publicize those who manage to craft high-quality olive oils. In other words, to provide value to the winning producers. After all, getting an award is pointless if no one knows about it.

Twenty-five dollars is my sweet spot when I'm wine shopping for my wife, Kelley. There are plenty of selections below $10 that might be superior to the $25 bottle I choose, but I wouldn't know.

My choice is completely driven by the packaging and price.

A producer might be able to offer a 500ml bottle for $12 at retail, but is there a chance he'd sell more at $19, $28 or even $48?

I sip tequila over ice in the summer and switch to scotch in the winter. My tequila is Casamigos – a brand founded in 2013 by the actor George Clooney, who then sold it a few years later for about a billion dollars.

There are 4 Casamigos varieties – blanco, reposado, añejo and mezcal – which correspond to their aging periods. I'll reach for one randomly, because they are all that good. They're at the high end, usually ranging between $45 and $60 for a bottle.

Once in a while when I'm at the store holding my $50 tequila, I'll feel a little guilty about selecting a $24.99 wine for Kelley, so I'll find one with a higher price to even things out and ease my conscience.

I've fallen prey to an abnormal market behavior known as the Veblen effect: A product's higher price alone will actually make me choose it over the others.

Thorstein Veblen was an economist who observed the patterns of conspicuous consumption. When the price of Veblen goods such as diamonds,  luxury watches, Gucci shoes and Birken bags decrease, demand will fall because status-conscious consumers will see them as less exclusive.

There are a few reasons we don't reveal the scores our judges attribute to entries in the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, but it boils down to the fact that they shouldn't be interpreted at face value.

Let's admit it. One taster's 84 is another's 86. A judge might assign higher scores earlier in the tasting than later in the morning. Some might lean toward certain sensory characteristics than others do.

They are renowned experts who together form a panel that represents the ultimate means to determine extra virgin olive oil quality. But they are human.

A few years ago, I made the decision to discontinue the Best in Class Award at the NYIOOC – which was bestowed on entries with the highest score in their respective category– due to my conviction that the scores are not sufficiently precise to make that call, and one excellent olive oil shouldn't be declared "better" than another excellent olive oil.

(Some enterprising folks nevertheless felt a need to build a ranking based on how many awards from various competitions a brand garnered in a given year, as if that measured anything but the companies' promotional budgets. But the websites for those rankings get almost no traffic according to metrics tools, revealing that the public doesn't care any more than I do.)

In our contest, scores are used only to determine if an oil earns an award or not – and whether it's a Silver or Gold, and I'm not crazy about that either.

One entry could get a score of 79.8 to earn a Silver, while another gets 80.1 to win Gold. Tasted again a few minutes later, the results might edge the other way around.

Olive oil competitions are imperfect, but they are the most effective way we have at the moment to recognize producers for their heroics and educate the public on matters of quality and value (though plenty of olive oil competitions do neither of those things).

The hidden scores I alone can see don't mean much on their own, but patterns might emerge when we zoom out to nine years of data we've collected in what amounts to the most comprehensive sensory analysis of the world's olive oils.

I hesitated to follow up an April post on California Olive Ranch (COR) with another one on the company, but come on.

You might recall the opposition among California producers over the marketing of imported oils under the California Olive Ranch brand.

Critics of the company say most consumers don't know they're buying imported olive oil when they choose one of COR's Destination Series products. The California Olive Oil Association enacted rules to reject COR, who essentially responded: We don't need you anyway.

COR is comfortable, it seems, using their California brand name to ship imported oils. It's a strategy straight out of the playbook Italy used to take over the world. Imitation is the highest form of flattery.

But this is the company that spearheaded smear campaigns against imported brands and touted truth in labeling. I guess that was before it dawned on them that they'd need more than the Central Valley to placate their investors.

The all-caps "CALIFORNIA" had no practical meaning on the label of COR's range, even if shoppers believed otherwise. And now, as it turns out, the all-caps "OLIVE" doesn't either.

The new Culinary Collection by the company takes the bait-and-switch one step further by cutting olive oil with avocado, walnut and almond oils – none of which come from an olive ranch – and a product described as sweet vanilla extra virgin olive oil.

We've officially lost California Olive Ranch as a role model in our industry. They've gone rogue.

There is no such thing as sweet vanilla extra virgin olive oil. Extra virgin by definition has no additives.

Mixing in avocado, walnut and almond oils makes it impossible to verify extra virgin olive oil was ever used in the mix at all. You might as well use a lower grade and call it extra virgin. But we're supposed to take COR at their word, like we do with potato chips allegedly made with EVOO and sardines supposedly floating in it.

I'm sure the California Olive Ranch Keto Blend, which contains some mix of avocado oil and, possibly at one time but it's impossible to know for sure, extra virgin olive oil from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Portugal and/or maybe California is a fine product.

It's just interesting to witness over the last ten years the evolution of a company from its righteous rebel pose, when it needed to be, to mass-market standpatter.

The process didn't happen overnight. In 2014, the company was putting futuristic harvest dates on its bottles to appear fresher than competing imports. Or was that 2015?

COR will be just fine. They have plenty of company in the other big bottlers occupying the wide middle shelf in the cooking oil aisle.

We'll be fine too, with more producers of extra virgin olive oil than ever before seeing the importance of educating the public on matters of quality, value, traceability and transparency.

There's an interesting article out today on Olive Oil Times with reporting by Nedjeljko Jusup and edited by Daniel Dawson.

Tomislav Duvnjak is an olive oil producer who won Gold and Silver Awards for two brands he submitted to the 2020 NYIOOC. Upon winning the coveted distinctions, Duvnjak was nevertheless dismayed that so few of his fellow Dalmatians had participated in the contest to elevate their region to the world stage.

He vowed to go door-to-door if necessary to increase the region's showing in the 2021 edition of the contest, but that wouldn't be necessary. After meetings with local officials and pitching his ideas to farmers' groups, everyone was on board with Duvnjak's plan.

When the winners of the 2021 NYIOOC are revealed next week, we're going to learn a lot about the award-winning brands, but we won't know anything about the entries that failed to make the grade.

I've said many times over the past ten years that our job is not just to draw attention to the winners. The contest's aim is to encourage every producer to craft the best product possible by educating the public on matters of olive oil quality and value.

Making a great olive oil is a hell of a task under the best conditions. Throw in droughts, floods, pests, heatwaves and cold snaps. Mix in Covid, and worker shortages. Top it off with low market prices and economic pressures and you can see why those who succeed in producing an excellent EVOO deserve much more than an award – they deserve our business.

I've done my share of bemoaning what seemed like lackluster growth in U.S. olive oil consumption over the past decade.

After all, thousands of studies extolled its health benefits over the period. Consumers' interest seemed to be climbing, and just about everyone in our industry had been doing their part to educate people on the value of high-quality olive oils.

Yet from 2010 through 2017, consumption hovered around 300,000 tons – about 10 percent of the global supply.

Some of you might have been in Washington with me in December 2012 for a hearing at the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) on the conditions of competition between American olive oil producers and major foreign suppliers.

Olive Oil Times was just a few years into covering industry news, and the USITC hearings felt like a big deal at the time – a courtroom drama pitting upstart American producers against old guard importers.

The main protagonist was California Olive Ranch (COR), who had been lobbying for what it called an "even playing field" with European producers who enjoyed, COR and others argued, unfair advantages, including government subsidies while they skirted quality standards and labeling rules.

"Once the U.S. olive oil industry is allowed to compete in a market fairly based on price and quality," COR vice president Adam Englehardt said at the proceedings, "consumers will be able to make informed purchasing decisions based on reliable labels and standards."

More than 95 percent of the olive oil Americans consume is imported. That trade imbalance, Englehardt argued, "would be expected if the U.S. was incapable of producing olive oil in large quantities." But COR was experiencing explosive growth at the time – buying land and making top-dollar deals with farmers as they worked their way onto the shelves of American grocery stores.

The hearing came on the heels of a groundbreaking UC Davis report, dubiously financed in part by California producers, that found more imported olive oils to be mislabeled than domestic ones. Then came a book, Extra Virginity by Tom Mueller, that revealed the dark side of the olive oil business.

Mainstream news whipped their readers into a frenzy with sensational headlines decrying olive oil fraud in the Old World, and COR was flying high – waving its California flag when consumer mistrust and Buy American sentiment were at their peak.

Then reality set in.

Another energetic upstart, Boundary Bend, flew in from Australia, set up shop in the Golden State and started paying farmers even more than COR had been. European firms expanded their operations in the Central Valley. And erratic weather, droughts and fires introduced elements of uncertainty into COR's neat, high-density rows of young Arbequina plants.

I'll admit I was surprised when we reported in 2012 that COR was in negotiations to buy a brand of Italian olive oil, Lucini. I chalked it up to a strategy by the company to broaden the distribution of its homegrown oils to specialty stores where Lucini was presumably stronger.

COR's CEO at the time was Gregg Kelley, a former Silicon Valley executive who knew how to raise cash – and he did. With new investors to appease, along with the company's original Spanish backers, the pressure to keep up the frenetic growth must have led to the next move.

“Our key challenge is supply,” Kelley said in 2015, not long after the Lucini acquisition. “We have enough land and resources here in California to satisfy the present demand,” he told Olive Oil Times. "You’ve got to remember that we’re operating with a view to the long term."

COR's need for continued growth and the realization that California alone couldn't satisfy much of America's 350,000-ton thirst for olive oil were what led Kelley's team to South American and European suppliers  – those dreaded imported oils that COR and its lobbyists spent so much time vilifying a few years earlier.

"We started by putting California on the map with COR," Kelley told us in 2017, "and now we hope to bring attention to Argentina." COR may have wanted to raise the profile of Argentinian producers, but not enough for a shoutout on the label.

In 2018, COR unveiled its "Destination Series" in the brand's recognizable packaging. Kelley must have been channeling his inner Cupertino when he okayed the slogan "Grown Globally, Crafted in California" that appeared in relatively small lettering under the "California" umbrella.

It's classic "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Suddenly, COR was a beneficiary of the subsidies they bemoaned. And for all their talk of truthful labels, many accused the brand of sporting one of the most deceptive labels in town.

Italy can relate.

Since forever, Italian olive oils have enjoyed a hard-earned reputation as the best on earth. The trouble has always been that there's very little of it to go around. Italians consume more than the country produces. How, then, have they managed to export a half-million tons to distant shores every year?

Like "Crafted in California," there was "Product of Italy" the slam-dunk selling point good enough to land Italian-blessed (if not produced) olive oils in every store, and nearly every kitchen, in the world.

Oils from Spain, Morocco, Greece and Tunisia were masterfully blended and packaged in bottles and tins with Italian brand names and images, and declared Product of Italy – while most of the olive oil that truly was Italian never left The Boot.

Then things started to change. Spain grew tired of basically devoting a third of its country to a profitless commodity and began efforts to fly its own flag, establish brands and add value. And Italian farmers started expressing their unease with products claiming to be Italian when they weren't.

The "Made in Italy" campaign began shaming companies that sought to deceive consumers, and new rules were written to force bottlers to be clearer about the origins of oils in Europe and beyond.

And that's what's happening now in California.

New legislation, AB-535, under debate would prohibit the use of “California olive oil,” “California olives” or other similar terms in brand names and packaging that are not produced from California-grown olives.

“This is in response to the growing devaluation of California extra virgin olive oil by California Olive Ranch’s products that cynically and with false representations carry the name California marqueed across their label to give consumers the impression the olive oil is from California," Alan Hilburg, the founder of the recently-formed California Coalition for Truth in Olive Oil Labeling, told Olive Oil Times.

But COR sees it differently. "The olive oil labels that AB-535 regulates are not misleading when they conspicuously identify their product’s region of origin,” the company's new CEO, Michael Fox, told Olive Oil Times. But if COR really wanted to be clear about the origin, why not create a separate brand for them, like its Lucini line?

In their 2019/20 membership agreement, the California Olive Oil Council announced a new rule: “If use of ‘California’ in any phrase such as company name, brand name, or other word or group of words, or images that identify California on the label of any oil sold by the member, then 100 [percent] of the fruit to produce the oil must come solely from the state of California.”

That made COR ineligible for membership in the group.  A spokesperson for the company said they had no intention of rejoining the COOC anyway.

The writing is on the wall. But the real problem here isn't that people can't tell if an oil is made in California or somewhere else from the label. The problem is that they care.

Whether an EVOO is made in Italy, California, Tunisia or Slovenia shouldn't be the most important factor in buying decisions. Sure, it's nice to see the origin without wordplay and deception, but what really matters is: Is it any good?

High-quality extra virgin olive oil is crafted in dozens of countries around the world, and producers of excellence, wherever they are, deserve your business.

The issue is that people don't know how to determine quality on their own, so they rely on the often cryptic information on labels that follow few rules.

Crafted in California is just another entry in a long list of meaningless marketing terms, like Product of Italy and cold-pressed.

In a perfect world, we'd all know how good EVOO should taste, and nationalism wouldn't have much of a role in our buying decisions. Until then, this is how it will go.

Buying olive oil for a specialty store, major retailer, or distributor is a great responsibility to bear. Your customers have been hearing about the value of extra virgin olive oil and are willing to pay more for it. It's up to you to deliver.

Attendees in our Education Lab programs have included quality control managers and buyers from some of the world’s largest retailers who understand that olive oil is unique among the products they handle.

When it comes to seeing what the world is thinking, there's no bigger window than Google, which processes nearly 3.5 billion searches every day – or about 1.2 trillion searches per year.

So it makes sense to look at the data on Google queries related to our category to see what trends might emerge, no?

You can burn a few hours like I did today only to find people are as confused as ever about our simple product. But at least they're curious.

Here's how Google sees the level of interest in olive oil-related search terms over the past five years. Notice the bump in March, 2020 when we went into lockdown and more people began paying closer attention to the foods they prepared at home.

Your olive oil might look nice on a shelf, but how does it show on an e-commerce page, Twitter post, Instagram story and Facebook feed?

Consumer decisions are increasingly driven by digital product images. If you're not considering how your packaging looks in a JPEG, it's time.

When a social share amounts to a tacit endorsement of the appearance of a product as well as its inherent qualities, the better your product looks, the more it will be talked about online.

I've been checking in with our photography team as they work through the process of capturing 1,171 olive oil bottles, tins, pouches and boxes for  this year's NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition.

While only the images of the eventual award-winners will appear on the pages of Olive Oil Times and the Official Index of the World's Best Olive Oils, we still photograph every entry submission in the weeks leading up to the judging.

Some of the images are stunning, with appealing package designs, nice proportions and clear branding that transcend the digital medium.

Here's an image of an award-winning brand from last year that leaps off the page with strong branding and appealing use of color: