IOC Approves New Limits for Fatty Acids, Restoring 'Extra Virgin' Status to Southern Italian Varieties

The International Olive Oil Council (IOC), dur­ing the ple­nary ses­sion in Tunisia, approved new para­me­ters for fatty acids allow­ing spe­cific vari­etals with unique chem­i­cal make­ups to meet the para­me­ters for the extra vir­gin grade.

With the new mea­sure, the lim­its of the hep­tade­canoic acid (C17:0) and hep­tade­cenoic acid (C17:1) will be respec­tively increased to 0.40 per­cent and 0.60 per­cent, while for the eicosenoic acid (C20:0) the limit is set at 0.50 per­cent.

“This new deci­sion, a result of a work car­ried out thanks to the syn­ergy between gov­ern­ment and national indus­try, fur­ther enhances the authen­tic­ity of the Italian olive oils and vari­etal rich­ness that con­tributes to their high qual­ity,” the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry stated in a press release.

The request for a review of the lim­its has been the focus of nego­ti­a­tions in recent months between Italy, the EU Commission and the mem­ber coun­tries of the IOC. One of the pro­tag­o­nists of the reassess­ment has been Lanfranco Conte, a lead­ing expert in olive oil chem­istry, a pro­fes­sor of food chem­istry at the University of Udine, and a mem­ber of the IOC’s chem­istry expert group.

Olive Oil Times met pro­fes­sor Conte to talk about the mod­i­fi­ca­tion that he elab­o­rated with Maurizio Servili, a pro­fes­sor of food tech­nol­ogy at the University of Perugia, and Angelo Faberi, of the Central Inspectorate for the pro­tec­tion of qual­ity and fraud pre­ven­tion of food prod­uct (ICQRF), which restored the sta­tus of extra vir­gin olive oils pro­duced from two vari­eties in par­tic­u­lar: Carolea from Calabria, and Coratina from Apulia.

“With the adop­tion of an over­all method in the frame­work of IOC and EU, it has become nec­es­sary to use two dec­i­mal places for the cal­cu­la­tion of fatty acids,” Conte explained. ​“The sec­ond dec­i­mal place added was, slightly reck­lessly, the zero, which means that the per­cent­age 0.3 allowed the olive oils that reached 0.34 to be reg­u­lar, while rely­ing on 0.30 the olive oils that come to 0.31 were non-com­pli­ant.”

Conte added that, in pre­vi­ous years, cul­ti­vars from Calabria in par­tic­u­lar had val­ues of hep­tade­canoic acid and hep­tade­cenoic acid slightly above the legal limit high­light­ing the need to revise the stan­dards.

Assuming that the C17 is not present in large quan­ti­ties in extra vir­gin olive oil, and is prac­ti­cally absent in any other veg­etable oil, meant that the increase of C17 would not lead to any fraud and the group of experts could ask for the increase to the bench­mark. Meanwhile, C20 was slightly higher than the pre­vi­ous limit in Coratina oils and, since its increase had no con­se­quences either, they urged the IOC to raise the legal limit.

The need for the revi­sion was expressed last fall dur­ing the con­fer­ence of the Accademia Nazionale dell’Olio e dell’Olivo (National acad­emy of olive oil and olive tree) in Spoleto and, in December, Conte, Servili and Faberi pre­pared a hypoth­e­sis for the mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the lim­its that was sent to the rel­e­vant insti­tu­tions, namely the Ministry of Agriculture, the IOC and EU Commission.

During the meet­ing of the IOC chemists held in April, the mod­i­fi­ca­tion was accepted by the mem­ber coun­tries and the new lim­its will be put in place for the EU at large.

Within the IOC a spe­cial­ized group has been formed to work with olive oils whose com­po­si­tions do not per­fectly meet the stan­dards, and that usu­ally come from defined areas.

For instance, the delta-7-stig­mas­tenol, which can also reveal the pres­ence of sun­flower and saf­flower oil, con­cerns pro­duc­tion from the area of east­ern Aegean Islands, Palestine and Syria, while an excess of campes­terol, which grows if you add other veg­etable oils, mainly con­cerns Southern Hemisphere oils from Argentina and Australia.

“In the case of the fatty acids we are talk­ing about, there is no pos­si­bil­ity that the expan­sion of lim­its would facil­i­tate frauds, and this vari­a­tion per­mits gen­uine extra vir­gin olive oils like Carolea and Coratina, that para­dox­i­cally based on the old lim­its could not be clas­si­fied as oils extracted from olives, to have now a reg­u­lar posi­tion,” Conte con­cluded.