The Lucrative Dark Side

Italian extra virgin olive oil should be rich and deep gold. It should consist only of that year’s harvest in it’s entirety. It should be cold pressed, without any sort of heat added to it to preserve the product’s integrity. It should be pure, not diluted with other lesser-quality oils. Extra virgin should be extra virgin; virgin should be labeled as the lesser quality that it is. Italian oil should be grown, cultivated, pressed, and bottled in Italy.

But most often, it’s not.Our olive oil will forever be authentic, pure, and traceable.

There’s been an explosion of food crime in Italy, fueling departments of food investigator police conducting inspections in hopes of catching the fake products. Organized crime has infiltrated the olive oil industry, and much of the Italian extra virgin olive oil on shelves in the US market – to the tune of 80% – is most often not that that all. Instead, it’s lesser-quality oil imported to Italy that is deodorized, diluted with seed oil, and touched up with chlorophyll for color.