The Bid to Boost Olive Oil Quality on Crete

On Crete, a hub of the Greek olive oil indus­try, grow­ers and pro­duc­ers are mov­ing to ensure qual­ity becomes an inte­gral part of olive cul­ti­va­tion and oil pro­duc­tion each year.

In boun­ti­ful har­vest sea­sons, Crete pro­duces approx­i­mately 90,000 tons of olive oil, 80 per­cent of which is graded as extra vir­gin.

Producer prices hover around €3.50 per kilo­gram of extra vir­gin olive oil, sim­i­lar to the aver­age prices at ori­gin in most pro­duc­ing areas of Greece.

According to indus­try pro­fes­sion­als, Cretan olive grow­ers are start­ing to adopt a more com­pre­hen­sive approach to olive cul­ti­va­tion than in the past, with the goal of improv­ing qual­ity.

“The grow­ers now know why they do some­thing in the field and when is the right time to do it,” agron­o­mist Antonis Marakakis said. ​“In tra­di­tional cul­ti­va­tion, they might just be ill-advised by the elders to do some­thing with­out really know­ing why.”

Cretan farm­ers have embraced the need to intro­duce new meth­ods into their farm­ing oper­a­tions to sus­tain their crops and improve the cal­iber of their olive oils.

“We are focused on qual­ity, and we bet­ter man­age work in the field to achieve sus­tain­abil­ity,” farmer Nikos Koukouvotakis said. ​“We cau­tiously use fer­til­iz­ers and prune the olive trees.”

“We want to move on to mod­ern cul­ti­va­tion tech­niques with the guid­ance of expe­ri­enced and com­pe­tent experts of the sec­tor,” he added.

For Emmanouil Karpadakis, the mar­ket­ing man­ager at Terra Creta, a pro­ducer and bot­tler on the west­ern side of Crete near Chania, mak­ing head­way in the indus­try is linked to inno­va­tion.

“If we want to go to the next level and have a bet­ter crop in terms of vol­ume and qual­ity, we need to imple­ment new rules,” Karpadakis said. ​“The research that has been done on the qual­ity of olive oil and its ingre­di­ents such as the phe­no­lic com­pounds can pro­vide the guide­lines to change our approach to cul­ti­vat­ing [olive trees] and extract­ing [olive oil].”

Olive oil pro­duc­ers from all the island’s regions have also applied for a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) sta­tus for the name Κρήτη/Kriti.

Should the European Commission reg­is­ter Cretan olive oil as a PGI, Cretan pro­duc­ers will effec­tively be able to mar­ket their olive oil under a stan­dard European Union qual­ity label with extra added value.

However, fac­tors that can pro­foundly affect the qual­ity of olive oil, such as adverse weather con­di­tions and the occur­rence of the olive fruit fly, remain a threat to all the olive oil-pro­duc­ing ter­ri­to­ries of Greece, includ­ing Crete.

In 2021, the unnat­u­rally warm and dry sum­mer that pre­ceded the har­vest­ing sea­son in Crete dried out the olive dru­pes in some areas of the island, impact­ing the aroma and fla­vor pro­file of the olive oils pro­duced in these areas.

On the other hand, inter­na­tional olive oil com­pe­ti­tions offer yet another way to ele­vate qual­ity, indus­try experts pointed out.

“In recent years, pro­duc­ers from Crete have been increas­ingly par­tic­i­pat­ing and win­ning in com­pe­ti­tions around the world,” said Eleftheria Germanaki, an agron­o­mist and panel super­vi­sor of the olive oil organolep­tic lab­o­ra­tory of Crete who also serves as a mem­ber of the NYIOOC panel of judges.

“Year after year, the pro­duc­ers are encour­aged to enter more com­pe­ti­tions world­wide which ulti­mately favors qual­ity,” she added. ​“However, anx­i­ety about the future con­tin­ues to exist. Production costs are on the rise, and the short­ages in the labor force able to work in the fields are pro­gres­sively becom­ing worse.”

Karpadakis said that efforts to improve olive oil qual­ity also have a ben­e­fi­cial spillover effect on the envi­ron­ment.

“[Better olive oil qual­ity] also means bet­ter envi­ron­ment, because when you work with the farm­ers, you can guide them on how to treat the trees in a more envi­ron­men­tally-friendly way, how to reduce the input for the soil and you can give them incen­tives to achieve bet­ter qual­ity,” he said.

Karpadakis added that a joint endeavor to pro­mote olive oil qual­ity ben­e­fits the whole olive oil chain – farm­ers, pro­duc­ers, bot­tlers and dis­trib­u­tors – and ulti­mately ben­e­fits the con­sumers ​“because they find qual­ity, authen­tic­ity and safety in the prod­uct they buy.”