Increased Attention on Olive Oil Volatile Compounds

The chem­i­cal mark­ers, in other words the ele­ments that give us the taste and aroma of olive oil, have been ana­lyzed in dif­fer­ent insti­tu­tional seats and con­fer­ences recently: from the EU Commission in Brussels to the chem­i­cal and sen­sory groups of the International Olive Council (IOC) in Madrid, to the Italian soci­ety for the study of fatty sub­stances (SISSG), and dur­ing meet­ings like the International Enological and Bottling Equipment Exhibition con­fer­ence (SIMEI) in Milan.

The results achieved will be used to sup­port the sen­sory method to eval­u­ate extra vir­gin olive oil with an instru­men­tal tool. ​“The goal of the under­way research on volatile com­pounds of olive oil is to iden­tify the mol­e­cules which are rec­og­nized by our sen­sory recep­tors, decod­ing their pres­ence through chem­i­cal para­me­ters,” explained Anna Cane, dur­ing the Symposium on volatile com­pounds of olive oil orga­nized in Rome (26 February) by Assitol, the Italian olive oil indus­try asso­ci­a­tion, with the sup­port of the IOC and the col­lab­o­ra­tion of the SISSG.

“It will be finally pos­si­ble to define inno­v­a­tive sci­en­tific instru­ments, made avail­able to the olive oil sec­tor, that can effec­tively sup­port the cur­rent qual­ity and authen­tic­ity con­trol meth­ods of prod­ucts.”

This was the start­ing point of the con­fer­ence where the best European researchers on volatiles com­pounds gath­ered, included Carlo Bicchi, pro­fes­sor of Pharmaceutical Biology at the University of Turin; Lanfranco Conte, pro­fes­sor of food chem­istry at the University of Udine; Maurizio Servili, pro­fes­sor of food tech­nol­ogy at the University of Perugia, Stefania Vichi, from the depart­ment of food and nutri­tion at the University of Barcelona; Ramón Aparicio from the Istituto de la Grasa CSIC in Sevilla; Anna Cane, super­vi­sor of tech­ni­cians at Assitol and Mercedes Fernández Albaladejo, the head of the IOC Olive Oil Chemistry and Standardization Unit.

The rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Central Inspectorate for the pro­tec­tion of qual­ity and fraud pre­ven­tion of food prod­ucts (ICQRF) Angelo Faberi, the pres­i­dent of the olive oil group of Assitol Angelo Cremonini and the gen­eral man­ager of Assitol Claudio Ranzani also attended the event that looked at the future of the qual­ity of olive oil.

Volatile com­pounds of vir­gin olive oils are the vehi­cles by which an intan­gi­ble but com­plex food com­mu­ni­cates a var­ied series of sen­sa­tions and emo­tions to our highly sophis­ti­cated per­cep­tual sys­tem. The odor­ous mol­e­cules that come into con­tact with the myr­iad of olfac­tory neu­rons end­ings (den­drites) placed in the nasal cav­ity in prox­im­ity of the eth­moid, under the cribrose lam­ina deter­mine an absolute con­cert of elec­tri­cal sig­nals which are then decoded both by con­scious brain (orbitofrontal cor­tex) and by the uncon­scious brain (amyg­dala), in order to trig­ger the whole set of emo­tions and sen­sa­tions (stim­uli) that extra vir­gin olive oils can give to their admir­ers. This accord­ing to Carlo Bicchi, who referred to the two Nobel Prizes for Medicine, Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck, for their dis­cov­er­ies of the odor­ant recep­tors and the genetic orga­ni­za­tion of olfac­tory sys­tem.

The more you delve into nature and the inti­mate rela­tion­ships between these mol­e­cules and the human per­cep­tual sys­tem, the more you can really know an agri-food prod­uct like olive oil, both in order to har­mo­nize leg­isla­tive sys­tems and improve qual­ity on the basis of the ulti­mate con­sumer need.

The road is not easy nor imme­di­ate, but pos­si­ble fol­low­ing the canons of sci­en­tific research and sup­port­ing young researchers which, at the European level, have accom­plished impor­tant results in the field of chemosen­sory qual­ity con­trol of oils from olives, as pre­sented by Stefania Vichi from the University of Barcelona. Following this path, it will be pos­si­ble to allo­cate to every prin­ci­pal sen­sa­tion a set of odor­ous mol­e­cules that inter­act in var­i­ous ways, as evi­denced by the numer­ous stud­ies car­ried out by Ramon Aparicio. This way it will be pos­si­ble to ver­ify and mon­i­tor more effi­ciently the man­u­fac­tur­ing processes of agri-food prod­ucts in order to sat­isfy the needs, not only qual­i­ta­tive but also emo­tional, of the mod­ern con­sumer.

“We want to com­bine qual­ity research with the needs of the con­sumer, using the tools that sci­ence makes avail­able,” said Angelo Cremonini of Assitol. ​“Promoting a real tast­ing edu­ca­tion and knowl­edge of prod­ucts, the con­sumer will finally become an impor­tant judge of qual­ity and, above all, from these stud­ies we can obtain valu­able infor­ma­tion to fight the most insid­i­ous frauds.”

Experts and entre­pre­neurs have reit­er­ated their com­mit­ment to a greater col­lab­o­ra­tion. The com­mon objec­tive of all the ongo­ing stud­ies is to pro­vide the entire sup­ply chain with inno­v­a­tive instru­ments capa­ble of ver­i­fy­ing the qual­ity and authen­tic­ity of the prod­ucts, stim­u­lat­ing new itin­er­aries of research in order to strengthen meth­ods and para­me­ters of sen­sory analy­sis and pro­vide greater guar­an­tees for oper­a­tors and con­sumers.

• Volatile Compounds and Technology (Servili Maurizio)


• Advanced chro­mato­graphic and MS expe­ri­ences in olive oils volatile com­pounds analy­sis (Stefania Vichi)


• Teatro Naturale


• Olio Officina