Few foods enjoy a better reputation than extra virgin olive oil. It is the centrepiece of the Mediterranean diet, recommended by doctors and poured with pride. It is also, on the evidence, one of the most misrepresented products in the grocery aisle. The gap between what the label promises and what the bottle delivers has grown wide enough to have its own studies, its own court cases, and its own word: fraud.
None of this means olive oil is bad for you. Real extra virgin is extraordinary. The problem is how little of what is sold actually qualifies, and how easily the words "extra virgin" are attached to oil that has lost, or never had, the things that make it worth buying.
Most imported "extra virgin" fails the standard
In a landmark series of tests, the University of California, Davis Olive Center found that 69% of imported olive oils labelled "extra virgin" failed to meet the international standard for extra virgin. Trained sensory panels judged sample after sample to be defective: rancid, fusty, musty, the marks of old or badly handled oil. These were not obscure bottles, but among the best-selling imported brands on the shelf.
Failing the standard is not always deliberate fraud. Often it is simply oil oxidised by heat, light and time, stripped of the very compounds it is sold for. But for the shopper the result is the same: you pay for extra virgin, and you do not get it.
University of California, Davis Olive Center (2010-2011).
of imported "extra virgin" failed the extra virgin standard in UC Davis testing.
olive oil tops the EU's list of foods most at risk of fraud.
olive oil fraud cases logged across the EU in 2024 alone, a record.
Sources: UC Davis Olive Center; The Guardian; Europol; Olive Oil Times.
Europe's most fraud-prone food
Defective oil is one half of the story. Deliberate fraud is the other. Olive oil now tops the European Union's list of products most at risk of food fraud, and reported cases have climbed to record highs: more than 180 across the EU in 2024 alone. As harvests have shrunk and prices have hit records, olive oil has become, in the words of investigators, "liquid gold" for criminals, with the trade in fakes estimated to cost the industry billions of euros a year.
This is not theoretical. In a single 2024 sweep, the Europol and Interpol operation OPSON seized tens of thousands of tonnes of fraudulent food, including, in Italy alone, around 42 tonnes of adulterated oil sold as Italian extra virgin, alongside sunflower oil and pomace bottled as olive oil, and hundreds of litres of chlorophyll used to dye cheap oil the right shade of green. Eleven criminal networks were dismantled in the process.
And those are only the cases that are caught. As more than one regulator has noted, the true scale is almost certainly far larger.
Europol Operation OPSON XIII (2024); The Guardian; Olive Oil Times.
How it is done
The mechanics are simple and well documented. The most common trick is to blend a little genuine oil with a great deal of cheaper oil, then give the bottle a famous-sounding origin. Lower grades are relabelled as extra virgin; oil from one country is sold as the produce of another.
The journalist Tom Mueller spent years inside the trade for his New Yorker investigation and his book Extra Virginity, and concluded that selling adulterated olive oil is about as profitable as trafficking some illegal drugs, and far less risky. Much of what is sold as "100% Italian," he found, is in truth a blend of cheaper oils from other countries.
The wellness markup
At the other end of the shelf sits a newer twist: the premium health play. Olive oil's genuine benefits, the polyphenols and the anti-inflammatory oleocanthal, have made it a wellness darling, and where there is a health halo there is a markup. Online it is easy to find oils sold for £20 a 100ml and more on the strength of those benefits, often with nothing published to verify either the claim or the source.
The science is real. That does not mean every bottle wearing it is.
How to buy a real one
The encouraging part is that real extra virgin is not hard to recognise once you know what protects it. The benefits live in fragile compounds, so the markers of quality are the practices that keep them intact: a stated polyphenol count and a genuine peppery bitterness; oil that is cold-pressed soon after picking; fruit that is hand-picked rather than machine-bruised; a single origin you can trace; and a producer who tests and proves what is inside, rather than asking you to trust the label.
Tick those boxes and the fraud problem largely solves itself. Very few oils tick all of them.
