Olive Oil Producers Embrace Eco-Friendly Packaging

Global brands are increas­ingly turn­ing to envi­ron­men­tally friendly pack­ag­ing for their prod­ucts.

The trend is also evi­dent in the olive oil sec­tor, where pro­duc­ers believe inno­v­a­tive pack­ag­ing solu­tions can reduce envi­ron­men­tal impact and enhance prod­uct qual­ity and con­sumer expe­ri­ence.

“There is a shift toward more eco-friendly pack­ag­ing, with glass bot­tles, tin cans and recy­clable mate­ri­als replac­ing tra­di­tional plas­tic,” Sean Zacot, Boss Strategy Global’s pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive, told Olive Oil Times.

“This aligns with con­sumer pref­er­ences for sus­tain­able prod­ucts,” he added. ​“Additionally, the pack­ag­ing is designed to pre­serve the fresh­ness and qual­ity of olive oil, with dark-col­ored bot­tles and air-tight seals to pro­tect against light and oxi­da­tion.”

Olive oil pro­duc­ers are adopt­ing strate­gies to become more sus­tain­able, such as intro­duc­ing alu­minum cans and recy­clable plas­tic refill con­tain­ers.

In Greece, the award-win­ning olive oil pro­ducer Neolea launched an eco-friendly pack­ag­ing cam­paign ear­lier this year.

The Corfu-based com­pany, which earned a Gold Award at the 2024 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, intro­duced extra vir­gin olive oil pack­aged in alu­minum cans.

Along with being recy­clable, the cans are equipped with a reusable ​“fresh cap” to pro­tect the olive oil’s healthy com­pounds, includ­ing polyphe­nols, fresh­ness and fla­vor. Neolea said the con­tainer offers a spill-free, flow-con­trolled pour­ing expe­ri­ence and can be resealed for future use.

“At Neolea, we’re push­ing the bound­aries of sus­tain­abil­ity and inno­va­tion,” the com­pany wrote on LinkedIn, explain­ing the deci­sion. ​“That’s why we’ve cho­sen eco-friendly alu­minum cans for our extra vir­gin olive oil. Aluminum is end­lessly recy­clable, light­weight for effi­cient trans­port, and gives our prod­uct a sleek, mod­ern look.”

On the other side of the Mediterranean, Tunisia’s largest olive oil brand, Terra Delyssa, plans to sell 150,000 of its new 750-mil­li­liter refill olive oil pack­ages by February 2025.

The brand, pro­duced by CHO Group, said con­sumers could buy the recy­clable plas­tic con­tain­ers to refill Terra Delyssa glass and plas­tic squeeze bot­tles, reduc­ing the company’s pack­ag­ing mate­r­ial con­sump­tion by 96 per­cent.

CHO Group added that the con­tain­ers retail for ten per­cent less than the equiv­a­lent bot­tled vol­ume.

While some pro­duc­ers have devel­oped new pack­ag­ing designs to address sus­tain­abil­ity, oth­ers have reduced or elim­i­nated their use of plas­tic.

Deoleo, the world’s largest olive oil bot­tler, announced plans in 2023 to intro­duce newly designed bot­tles made from recy­cled plas­tic that use ten per­cent less plas­tic.

Italian pro­ducer Al Piglio went a step fur­ther. The three-year-old com­pa­ny’s founders decided not to use plas­tic pack­ag­ing from the begin­ning.

The shift among olive oil pro­duc­ers is part of a broader move­ment toward sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing within the con­sumer goods sec­tor.

Unilever, a dom­i­nant olive oil retailer in Greece until the 2017 sale of that busi­ness, is mak­ing sig­nif­i­cant strides toward sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing.

The multi­na­tional said it will halve its use of vir­gin plas­tic by 2025, increase its use of post-con­sumer recy­cled plas­tic and launch new pack­ag­ing for­mats, such as recy­clable paper-based ice cream tubs.

The com­pany is also explor­ing reusable and refill­able pack­ag­ing mod­els and devel­op­ing coun­try-spe­cific roadmaps to col­lect and process more plas­tic pack­ag­ing than it sells.

Many other con­sumer goods com­pa­nies have announced sim­i­lar pack­ag­ing strate­gies to reduce plas­tic use and appeal to envi­ron­men­tally con­scious con­sumers, includ­ing Coca-Cola, Mars, Nestlé and L’Oreal.

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, food pack­ag­ing accounts for nearly 50 per­cent of the coun­try’s waste.

In con­trast, more than 80 per­cent of house­hold plas­tic waste in the United Kingdom comes from food and bev­er­age pack­ag­ing.

Much of this pack­ag­ing is non-recy­clable and ends up in land­fills, lead­ing to microplas­tic pol­lu­tion and sig­nif­i­cant methane emis­sions.

At the begin­ning of December, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution adjourned its fifth annual meet­ing with­out final­iz­ing a treaty on plas­tic pol­lu­tion, high­light­ing the urgent need for sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing solu­tions in the food indus­try.

While plenty of work is needed, recent research has demon­strated the sig­nif­i­cant mar­ket­ing advan­tages of being per­ceived as an envi­ron­men­tally friendly busi­ness.

A 2021 sur­vey from con­sul­tancy Simon-Kucher & Partners found that 71 per­cent of respon­dents had expe­ri­enced mod­est or sig­nif­i­cant changes in their pur­chas­ing behav­ior toward more sus­tain­able options in the past five years.

As a result, a sep­a­rate July 2022 sur­vey of 1,000 busi­nesses in Western Europe found that one-third of respon­dents spend more on sus­tain­abil­ity mar­ket­ing cam­paigns than nor­mal ones.

“Every sector’s talk­ing about sus­tain­abil­ity more,” Andrew Winston, a sus­tain­able busi­ness strate­gist and advi­sor, told Olive Oil Times in a July 2023 inter­view.

He added that com­pa­nies meet­ing their sus­tain­abil­ity goals are gen­er­ally more suc­cess­ful in other busi­ness areas.

“Companies that do bet­ter in sus­tain­abil­ity man­age­ment, gen­er­ally, just do bet­ter on man­age­ment. It’s always been a really good proxy for that,” Winston said.

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