Food Fraud...

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I've to protect the olive oil producers. It's very hard to produce one line of olive oil in a constant quality/taste from one region. We would need to either build large fields of olives or live with a variety of thousand different bottles of olive oil in the supermarket, all with different produced label and different tastes.
Usually the cheap ones in europe will be gathered from different countries in similar quality and they make a blend, similar like the big whiskey producers.
Today most people here in Germany are not willing to pay the price for olive oil, so we usually don't have the best prices for good oil in the global market.
 
kaneohegirlinaz said:
Kirkland brand Olive Oil, the popular one that loads of folks buy ... "with select oils form ..." WHAT?!
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Yep - strange but true.
Spain is the biggest olive producer in the world, with around 9.8 million tons a year. Italy follows - with a mere 1.9 million tons. If you sum the 10 biggest producers of olives together, excluding Spain, they just reach 9.8 million tons a year. Those producers are Italy, Morocco, Greece, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Portugal, Syria and Perú. I know for a fact that Italy doesn´t produce enough olive oil to sell everything as "Italian" (two friends of friends who are producers) so "Italian" olive oil is often a large percentage of local oil an added
 
It happens in European products as well. My wife returned from the supermarket with a bottle of Italian extra virgin olive oil. I looked at it and told her that it wasn't extra virgin. I could tell from the color. I read the label and found that it was an oil blend that had 20% EV olive oil in it. The label screamed extra virgin. She won't do that again. :wink:
 
karadekoolaid said:
Yep - strange but true.
Spain is the biggest olive producer in the world, with around 9.8 million tons a year. Italy follows - with a mere 1.9 million tons. If you sum the 10 biggest producers of olives together, excluding Spain, they just reach 9.8 million tons a year. Those producers are Italy, Morocco, Greece, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Portugal, Syria and Perú. I know for a fact that Italy doesn´t produce enough olive oil to sell everything as "Italian" (two friends of friends who are producers) so "Italian" olive oil is often a large percentage of local oil an added
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Regarding Spain, I visit an automotive customer about 60 miles north of Granada and to get from the airport to the customer I travel through "The Sea of Olives" which has endless olive groves and covers most of Southern Spain. There's a shop and restaurant on the way that has what must be hundreds of different varieties and grades of olive oil.
 
medtran49 said:
I've gotten burned on oil blends because I didn't actually look at and read the whole label.

Years ago, we were shopping and I noticed a package of frozen crawfish tails at a really great price. They were still expensive, but way lower than what we had paid previously. It had Breaux Bridge, a known producer of good crawfish in Louisiana, featured prominently on the label. Thinking this price was too good to be true, I flipped the package over and read the fine print. The crawfish were from China and were shipped to and packaged in Breaux Bridge so they could take advantage of the name.
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It is false advertising and is a problem. Not long ago my wife brought home a bottle of EVOO. It had slightly slight pale green color and obviously was not EVOO despite the large letters on the label saying it was. In smaller letters it mentioned that it was only 20% EVOO. That is not OK.

While I think it would be fine as a cooking oil I will never patronize the brand again. I took the trouble to email them with that promise. If you want to sell an oil blend explain that clearly on the label. Call it vegetable oil with 20% EVOO. It is inappropriate for seasoning food and wasteful for cooking but somebody may want it for some reason. But don't try to confuse the consumer with obfuscation. End of rant.
 
blades said:
It is false advertising and is a problem. Not long ago my wife brought home a bottle of EVOO. It had slightly slight pale green color and obviously was not EVOO despite the large letters on the label saying it was. In smaller letters it mentioned that it was only 20% EVOO. That is not OK.

While I think it would be fine as a cooking oil I will never patronize the brand again. I took the trouble to email them with that promise. If you want to sell an oil blend explain that clearly on the label. Call it vegetable oil with 20% EVOO. It is inappropriate for seasoning food and wasteful for cooking but somebody may want it for some reason. But don't try to confuse the consumer with obfuscation. End of rant.
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I was once a big fan of olive oil, but recently, I've been using canola oil. I''ve also used EVOO, I found that to be kind of expensive. Besides, a recipe doesn't know what oil what you're using. That is, unless the recipe has a connection to the food police!! Hah!!!! :whistling:
 
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GadgetGuy said:
Besides, a recipe doesn't know what oil that you're using.
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I beg to disagree with you there. Cook Chinese, Indonesian or Indian food with olive oil and it just tastes wrong. Like making scones/biscuits with rice flour instead of wheat flour.
I've used canola oil, but sometimes there's a wierd sort of fishy taste to it.
 
karadekoolaid said:
I beg to disagree with you there. Cook Chinese, Indonesian or Indian food with olive oil and it just tastes wrong. Like making scones/biscuits with rice flour instead of wheat flour.
I've used canola oil, but sometimes there's a wierd sort of fishy taste to it.
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Canola oil is one of the ones that you can use for deep frying because of it's high tolerance & resistance to heat. Olive oil is good, but not for deep frying. It'll start to smoke & burn. :ninja:
 
Olive oil and fish are two products that you have to really be careful with when buying. With OO, you can't just go by the brand name to be sure you are getting a good product. As for fish, so many filets look the same, that it is easy to substitute cheap fish for expensive ones.

CD
 
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