'Crafted in California' Makes its Debut

Maybe the New World isn’t so new after all.

Since, oh, the begin­ning of time, any olive oil that ever-so-briefly may have brushed the blessed shores of Italy were embla­zoned with the myth­i­cal Made in Italy dis­tinc­tion and set forth unto the world to com­mand much higher prices than oils that admit­ted where they were really from.

The public’s demand for trans­parency and authen­tic prod­ucts and efforts by eth­i­cal pro­duc­ers led to national cam­paigns that sought to restore the ​“Made in Italy” brand and reserve its exclu­sive use for oils that were, well, made in Italy.

In fact, it was the pub­lic sham­ing of those old shenani­gans and other unseemly prac­tices that helped give rise to the value of home­grown oils from places like Australia, South Africa, Argentina and California.

Now, in a move straight out of the old Italian play­book, the largest American olive oil pro­ducer has announced a new ​“Crafted in California” range of imported oil blends.

California Olive Ranch (COR) explains on its web­site:

“It’s no secret that farm­ing is a dif­fi­cult busi­ness and grow­ing olives is not with­out its chal­lenges. This year, we, along with farm­ers of all kinds of crops through­out California, were hit with a freeze dur­ing our bloom sea­son. This dras­ti­cally reduced the size of our crop, com­pro­mis­ing our abil­ity to make good on our promise of pro­vid­ing Americans with high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil at a rea­son­able price.”

In other words, California’s lead­ing olive oil com­pany can’t feed its thriv­ing sales chan­nels with a lim­ited sup­ply of California fruit that’s com­mand­ing ever-higher prices.

The real­ity of the mat­ter, of course, is that American con­sumers who have been led by cam­paigns fueled by COR and oth­ers to devalue imported oils will not take the time to check the ori­gins of the new ​“Destinations” range.

The front label points out that the prod­uct is ​“Grown Globally, Crafted in California” which is rem­i­nis­cent of the ​“Designed by Apple in California” that bil­lions of us have seen on the devices in our hands (COR’s CEO, Gregg Kelley, is a sil­i­con-val­ley vet­eran). The com­pany pre­dictably omits ​“imported” — the buzz­word of the pub­lic-rela­tions bash­ing COR helped finance.

“In the recent past, we saw coun­try codes in small print on the back label,” Kelley told Olive Oil Times when asked about the new range. ​“California Olive Ranch wants to change that, and we’re proudly shar­ing the care­fully selected global part­ners who grow, har­vest and mill with the same pas­sion and focus on qual­ity as we do.”

But it would be inter­est­ing to ask ten peo­ple who pur­chased a bot­tle from the new range, ​“Did you know the oil you just bought is from Argentina, Portugal and Spain?”

More likely, just as the iconic Italian scenes that adorn the bot­tles of oils from Tunisia, Spain, Morocco and Greece, COR’s famil­iar rancher logo with the all-caps CALIFORNIA will be all that is needed to close the deal.

Great olive oil comes from California, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Argentina and dozens of other coun­tries in the world. Blurring the nation­al­is­tic lines and focus­ing instead on qual­ity can be con­struc­tive. But COR and its domes­tic part­ners came into this fight swing­ing, through coor­di­nated efforts to debase the opaque prac­tices of their imported rivals, includ­ing one prac­tice it now seems to have adopted.

After a par­tic­u­larly bad sea­son, COR is hop­ing to sell a lot of imported olive oil under its all-caps ​“California” head­ing and American con­sumers, trained by now to reach for local prod­ucts, likely won’t notice a thing.

“We are cur­rently fac­ing a crop dis­as­ter that will impact every California olive oil pro­ducer across the board,” Kelley said. ​“Our mis­sion is to remain hon­est and trans­par­ent with American con­sumers on the state of the California crop.”

Which is to say, get used to imported oils fly­ing the California flag.