`New World Labs Release Latest Jab at Imported Olive Oils - Olive Oil Times

New World Labs Release Latest Jab at Imported Olive Oils

By Olive Oil Times Staff
Apr. 13, 2011 12:39 UTC

In a redux of last Summer’s slam­ming of imported olive oils, the UC Davis Olive Center and the Australian Oils Research Laboratory have teamed up again to offer a crit­i­cal assess­ment of the qual­ity of some of America’s top-sell­ing olive oil brands found on the super­mar­ket shelves in California.

Today’s report, Evaluation of Extra-Virgin Olive Oil Sold in California, shows researchers took into account at least some of the crit­i­cism of last year’s meth­ods by draw­ing a much larger sam­pling of top-sell­ing imported olive oils and using tests accred­ited by the International Olive Council.

The imported olive oils tested were Colavita, Star, Bertolli, Filippo Berio, Pompeian and a pre­mium brand, Lucini. They were com­pared to California Olive Ranch (COR) and Cobram Estate — the largest American and Australian olive oil pro­duc­ers.

The report con­cluded lab­o­ra­tory tests found that the top-sell­ing imported brands of extra vir­gin’ olive oil sold in the United States and pur­chased at retail loca­tions through­out California often failed the IOC’s sen­sory stan­dards for extra vir­gin olive oil.”

It was­n’t all good news for Australia and California, though. Eleven per­cent of the Californian, and all of the Australian olive oils failed the PPP” (pyropheo­phy­tine) tests which indi­cated they were exposed to heat and light or adul­ter­ated with refined oils. In a state­ment on the California Olive Ranch web­site, Vice President of Marketing Claude S. Weiller expressed dis­ap­point­ment that two COR bot­tles failed the PPP test. Our invest­ment in tech­nol­ogy that allows us to iden­tify the olives used to make our oil should help us under­stand what hap­pened to the two bot­tles that didn’t pass muster”, he wrote.

The study was con­ducted by the University of California at Davis’ Olive Center which is sup­ported by the California Olive Oil Council, whose mem­bers stand to gain from the dis­cred­it­ing of imported olive oil. California olive oil pro­duc­ers pro­vide about one per­cent of the olive oil con­sumed in the United States, but they are devel­op­ing the capac­ity to sup­ply much more than that.

It’s the lat­est chap­ter in what has become a con­tentious indus­try, increas­ingly divided into New and Old World pro­duc­ers pur­su­ing an advan­tage to cap­ture more of Americans’ grow­ing appetite for olive oil.

See also: Olive Council Issues Harsh Response to Second Davis Study of Imported Olive Oils

Click here to view the PDF.



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