Using Isotopic Footprints to Authenticate Olive Oil, Combat Fraud

A new sci­en­tific and legal cer­ti­fi­ca­tion will help con­firm the ori­gin of and pro­mote extra vir­gin olive oil pro­duced in the cen­tral Italian region of Umbria.

Producers who adopt the iso­topic trace­abil­ity sys­tem will be able to guar­an­tee the ori­gin, organolep­tic fea­tures and ben­e­fi­cial prop­er­ties of their extra vir­gin olive oils to the con­sumers.

Widely used in other seg­ments of the agri-food sec­tor, such as wine and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, iso­topic trace­abil­ity iden­ti­fies extra vir­gin olive oil from Umbria using a spe­cific set of char­ac­ter­is­tics.

“Identifying the iso­topic foot­print of food means gath­er­ing a lot of infor­ma­tion about its ori­gin,” Luana Bontempo, a researcher at the Edmund Mach Foundation in Terni, told Olive Oil Times. ​“Isotopes are atoms of a sin­gle ele­ment dif­fer­en­ti­ated by their mass; that is why in nature, we find them in dif­fer­ent quan­ti­ties. Their pro­file depends on many dif­fer­ent fac­tors.”

Those fac­tors include geo­log­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of the land of ori­gin, loca­tion, lat­i­tude, dis­tance from the sea, tem­per­a­ture, rain­fall and the fer­til­iza­tion pro­ce­dures adopted in the area. They also incor­po­rate the cul­ti­var involved and the specifics of the olive oil pro­duc­tion process. All of this infor­ma­tion con­sti­tutes the olive oil iden­tity card.

The con­tents of an extra vir­gin olive oil must match those listed in a data­base that researchers have com­piled by exam­in­ing local olive oil, soil and cli­mate to trace its ori­gin and define its foot­print.

Bontempo and her col­leagues from the local farm­ers’ asso­ci­a­tions Confagricoltura Umbria and the Assoprol Umbria OP ini­tially focused on ana­lyz­ing hun­dreds of olive oil sam­ples from parts of Umbria with a Protected Designation of Origin cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

The analy­sis allowed the researchers to under­stand the unique rela­tion­ships among sta­ble iso­topes of bio-ele­ments, which sup­port the def­i­n­i­tion of a rec­og­niz­able and ver­i­fi­able foot­print.

“In olive oil, we have inves­ti­gated the iso­topic rela­tion­ships related to three bio-ele­ments such as hydro­gen, car­bon and oxy­gen,” Bontempo said.

Once the foot­print data­base has been cre­ated, the fol­low­ing iso­topic analy­ses are quick and straight­for­ward. The olive oil sam­ple can be ana­lyzed as it is, with none of the pre-treat­ments required for other tech­ni­cal pro­ce­dures aimed at deter­min­ing a product’s ori­gin.

“This approach is mean­ing­ful not only for ver­i­fy­ing the authen­tic­ity [of olive oil] but also to com­bat fraud,” Bontempo said. ​“It allows us to pro­tect and give value to spe­cific high-qual­ity prod­ucts and can be used both by offi­cial ver­i­fi­ca­tion bod­ies and con­sor­tia that work to pro­tect their prod­ucts.”

Fabio Rossi, the pres­i­dent of Confagricoltura Umbria, said the project, which is financed with regional devel­op­ment funds, is a col­lec­tive effort to make Umbria more effec­tive at com­bat­ting fraud.

“Given the news that some­times appears in the press, many con­sumers risk step­ping away from high-qual­ity, healthy olive oil,” he told Olive Oil Times. ​“So we need to offer them a ver­i­fied and legally valid trace­abil­ity sys­tem that can guar­an­tee the ori­gin and the con­tents of the extra vir­gin olive oil they are buy­ing.”

After more than two years of research, the analy­sis con­firmed a very clear iso­topic foot­print for Umbria extra vir­gin olive oil.

“In a few cases, it could be con­fused with extra vir­gin olive oil from the nearby regions of Tuscany or Marche, but it is very dif­fer­ent if com­pared to Sicilian, Tunisian or Spanish olive oil,” Rossi said.

“Efficacy and robust­ness of this ana­lyt­i­cal approach are proven by the fact that in the last 20 years, the analy­sis of sta­ble bio-ele­ments iso­topes has been rec­og­nized as an offi­cial method of ver­i­fi­ca­tion,” Bontempo added.

“It is used for wine at the European level, for instance, to iden­tify fraud such as water addi­tions or exoge­nous sugar addi­tions, as well as for the ver­i­fi­ca­tion of the geo­graph­i­cal ori­gin and the year of pro­duc­tion,” she said.

On top of the new ver­i­fi­able trace­abil­ity, Confagricoltura and its sci­en­tific part­ners are work­ing on trac­ing back the his­tor­i­cal and ter­ri­to­r­ial roots of spe­cific cul­ti­vars.

“We are inves­ti­gat­ing how, when and why those [cul­ti­vars] began thriv­ing in the region, and we will add to that infor­ma­tion the iso­topic trace­abil­ity,” Rossi said. ​“The con­sumers will not only know about the his­tory of local extra vir­gin olive oils but they will also be informed about its com­po­si­tion and its spe­cific health ben­e­fits due to the unique­ness of its locally-spe­cific con­tents.”

The cur­rent method­ol­ogy is quickly under­go­ing major changes that could soon open the door to wide­spread adop­tion of the iso­topic analy­sis.

“The most recent devel­op­ments in the iso­topic approach aim at build­ing iso­topic pre­dic­tive maps, iso-scapes, which would allow us to match the iso­topic rela­tion­ships with the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the prod­uct loca­tion of ori­gin,” Bontempo con­cluded. ​“This would greatly reduce the need to build exten­sive datasets, which might be eco­nom­i­cally costly and time-con­sum­ing.”

• Edmund Mach Foundation