A guide to combating fraud involving olive oil and olive pomace. This is what the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mapa) has prepared, crowning a campaign that will last throughout 2023. The recommendations are based on the experience of the anti-fraud services of the autonomous communities and of the Ministry itself, in order to make programming and inspections as effective as possible. For this campaign, a specific control plan for olive oil and pomace was approved last November, which is currently being applied, and which integrates the controls deriving from Community and national legislation.

For the year 2023, within the National Program for the Official Control of Food Quality (Pncoca 2021-2025), the Autonomous Communities have planned 697 controls in the olive oil and olive pomace oil sector based on a risk assessment and in its number of operators, which stands at almost 6% more than the previous year and which controls around 20% of operators. Furthermore, in application of the quality standard, checks will be carried out for the first time to verify the traceability of the sector, which will reach 10% of operators.

The quality standard for olive oil and olive pomace was approved in August 2021 (Royal Decree 760/2021, of August 31st), in order to improve the traceability of these products, especially extra virgin olive oil olive oil, and re-evaluate this symbol of the Mediterranean diet. This standard meets new needs for transparency from the public and satisfies a historical claim of the Spanish olive sector.

“The guide approved today is a tool to facilitate quality controls with a system that does not exist in any other country in the world and which places Spain at the forefront of olive oil quality requirements”, the site reads of the Map.

Spain, which has more than 2.75 million hectares of olive groves and about 3,500 industries dedicated to the sector, with an average of 1.4 million tons per year, and exports to 150 countries for a value of over 2,800 million EUR.