Spanish Agencies Renew Pact to Conquer Indian, UK Markets for Table Olives

In the lat­est agree­ment between Extenda (the Andalusian Agency for External Promotion) and Interaceituna (the Inter-Professional Table Olive Organization), €800,000 ($933,680) in new invest­ment will be devoted in 2018 to pro­mot­ing the con­sump­tion of Spanish olives in the UK and India.

The fig­ure agreed upon is twice that of 2015, and mar­ket share increases sug­gest that the invest­ment is pay­ing off. In 2016 – 2017, India’s Spanish table olive imports increased 100 per­cent on 2014 to approx­i­mately 2,000 tons, with exports from Andalusia alone valu­ing €3.4 mil­lion ($3.98 mil­lion).

UK imports are also show­ing steady growth at around 9.6 per­cent in the last decade, and as the fifth-largest des­ti­na­tion for Andalusian olives (23,400 tons in 2017), both Extenda and Interaceituna are deter­mined not to become com­pla­cent in this mature and sta­ble mar­ket.

With table olives rep­re­sent­ing a major export for Spain, and par­tic­u­larly for the autonomous Andalusia which accounted for 73 per­cent (€514 milion/$602 mil­lion) of the country’s total in 2017, a col­lab­o­ra­tion between the pri­vate and pub­lic sec­tors is seen as key to boost­ing exports, a strat­egy now in its twelfth year.

As such, India and the UK rep­re­sent major oppor­tu­ni­ties at either end of the spec­trum, and accord­ing to Extenda, this new agree­ment and con­tin­ued coop­er­a­tion is ​“key to the devel­op­ment of pro­mo­tional cam­paigns for table olives in two mar­kets of high impor­tance for the Spanish sec­tor.”

Perhaps most sig­nif­i­cantly, this agree­ment also sees the renewed endorse­ment of the ​“Olives from Spain” cam­paigns that have sought to boost Spain’s brand recog­ni­tion across the world by fos­ter­ing the asso­ci­a­tion between high qual­ity and Spanish ori­gin.

This strat­egy has taken advan­tage of the global rise in pop­u­lar­ity of the Mediterranean diet, cit­ing the country’s geo­graph­i­cal and cul­tural her­itage as evi­dence of the authen­tic­ity of its prod­ucts.

These cam­paigns aren’t lim­ited to India and the UK, though. The mes­sage is one that’s been tried and tested from Canada to Russia in keep­ing with Extenda’s aim to build ​“a strat­egy sus­tained over time, and directed at those mar­kets of inter­est that stand out each year.”

Exploiting almost every avail­able medium, the agency has used graphic design, online mar­ket­ing, inter­na­tional trade fairs, and gas­tron­omy exhi­bi­tions to raise the pro­file of the Spanish olive, using English to cut through cul­tural and lin­guis­tic divides as a mod­ern-day lin­gua franca.

Given that this is the third time sig­nif­i­cant funds have been allo­cated to expand­ing the UK mar­ket, and the fifth con­sec­u­tive year that India has been tar­geted, it seems likely that these are two fronts on which Spain will con­tinue to vie for dom­i­nance for the fore­see­able future.

• Extenda-Interaceituna 2018 agree­ment


• Olives from Spain UK