Peru Has Its Own Olive Council-Approved Tasting Panel

Producers and offi­cials in Peru cel­e­brated the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the country’s first International Olive Council-approved tast­ing panel ahead of what is expected to be a bumper har­vest.

The 12-mem­ber panel was formed in Tacna, the country’s olive-grow­ing cap­i­tal, to help improve olive oil qual­ity and aid in the region’s pur­suit of a geo­graph­i­cal indi­ca­tion cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

There is also opti­mism that the cred­i­bil­ity pro­vided by an IOC-approved tast­ing panel cer­ti­fi­ca­tion will add value to indi­vid­u­ally pack­aged exports.

“The tast­ing panel was iden­ti­fied as a need to sup­port the pro­duc­tion of qual­ity olive oils in Peru and to some­what close the inno­va­tion gaps that we had iden­ti­fied at the level of our region,” said Lourdes González, an award-win­ning pro­ducer at Vallesur and panel leader.

Previously, Peruvian pro­duc­ers had to send sam­ples to neigh­bor­ing Chile to be cer­ti­fied as extra vir­gin olive oil – which requires phys­io­chem­i­cal and organolep­tic test­ing – from an accred­ited tast­ing panel.

González said the wide­spread sen­sory analy­sis of Peruvian olive oil each year would also pro­vide pro­duc­ers with feed­back to fix any agro­nomic or milling prob­lems known to lead to com­mon defects.

She added that pro­duc­ers in Peru must improve qual­ity to com­pete locally against imports and inter­na­tion­ally at the higher end of the mar­ket.

“In Tacna, are we bet­ting on a future Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) for olive oil,” she said. ​“We have iden­ti­fied char­ac­ter­is­tics that make a PDO cer­ti­fi­ca­tion appro­pri­ate. The panel will be a key tool in sup­port­ing this ini­tia­tive.”

The panel for­ma­tion also comes ahead of what González expects as a bumper crop in Peru.

After a hot win­ter that resulted in a his­tor­i­cally poor har­vest in 2024, she said con­di­tions had been excel­lent ahead of the 2025 har­vest.

“We had a nor­mal win­ter with ade­quate tem­per­a­tures, then there was an intense flow­er­ing phe­nom­e­non, and there was a good per­cent­age of fruit set,” González said. ​“Consequently, this year’s pro­duc­tion will exceed the aver­age.”

However, Gianfranco Vargas, another pro­ducer near Tacna, warned about the con­tin­ued spread of the Mediterranean fruit fly, the lar­vae of which feed on olives.

While the infes­ta­tion has since come under con­trol in neigh­bor­ing Chile, Vargas indi­cated that the tripling of the num­ber of hectares of fruit trees planted in south­ern Peru in the past 15 years has not been accom­pa­nied by an increase in resources for mon­i­tor­ing.

“Since we filed the com­plaint in Tacna, the num­ber of fruit flies cap­tured has increased monthly,” he said. ​“This increase had been drag­ging on since September of last year due to the increase in the hot sea­son, which has accel­er­ated the flies’ repro­duc­tive cycle.”

Officials in the region have responded by har­vest­ing and bury­ing over­ripe fruit that would oth­er­wise be left to rot in the field and incu­bate future gen­er­a­tions of the fly.

Despite these efforts, Vargas is skep­ti­cal that the National Service of Agrarian Health (Sensa) will meet its two to three-year tar­get of elim­i­nat­ing the fruit fly in the region.

• Diario Correo