"Oil is progress" is the main theme of the XII edition of Olio Officina Festival. Conceived and directed by Luigi Caricato , the great international happening dedicated to extra virgin olive oil and "condiments for the palate and mind" will take place from 2 to 4 March 2023 at the Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan, with free admission. The three-day program, centered on one of the treasures of Italian agri-food, includes a review of international oils, tasting workshops with oil/food pairing tasting sessions and meetings with producers; talks on the economy of oil, its uses in the kitchen and cosmetics, the value of packaging, therefore attention to design, art and literature, the maximum expressions of progress.

The 2023 edition also presents a focus focused on oil and children, "exceptional tasters, because they are still free from preconceived visions and the sensory bias that instead spoils and invalidates the evaluations of adults, with cooking school, tasting sessions and game of 'oil to learn, jumping from one box to another, the millenary history of oil and how it is produced, from the tree to the table".

Olio Officina Festival will also be an opportunity to make an all-round reflection on the state of the oil sector which is at a turning point: "Italian olive growing must make a cultural and cultural leap from tradition to progress", says Caricato. This is the time to decide whether to make Italian olive growing competitive - as well as for the unquestionable quality of the oil - also for production volumes and palatability, applying progress through the rationalization of all phases of the production process, from agricultural to commercial. The difficult 2022/2023 oil campaign will in fact produce just over 200,000 tons of oil, when our country's needs are 1 million tons. With olive growing that looks to progress, accepting the transition to a more entrepreneurial, technological and professional approach, self-sufficiency would not be achieved, but production could be greatly increased, making adequate use of it both in Italy and on foreign markets.

In the light of Italian olive production, clearly lower than the national requirement (200,000 tons of oil, when the requirement is 1 million tons), the creator and director of the Oof adds: "In Italy too often companies traditional low density - with large unoccupied portions of land between one olive tree and another - which has its roots in a cultural, but also cultural and sociological model of the past when the plot of land was the "pantry" of the families who they derived their livelihood from that land: between the rows of olive trees they planted cereals, vegetables, vines, fruit trees.Today it is necessary that Italian olive entrepreneurs, supported by an adequate and coherent political will, decide what they want to do "when they grow up ": whether to believe in a systemic, united, modern and economically efficient olive cultivation, or to produce oil for pleasure".