India’s Olive Oil Imports Jump 60 Percent in a Year
India imported 4,187 tonnes of olive oil in 2010, against 2,617 tonnes the year before, a rise of nearly 60 percent in twelve months. Spain and Italy supply about 90 percent of it, with Turkey taking around 5 percent. Every olive oil exporting country now has an India plan. Here are the numbers behind the excitement, the tax decision that made it possible, and the part of the story the presentations leave out.
The numbers
| Year | Indian olive oil imports |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 2,617 tonnes |
| 2010 | 4,187 tonnes |
| Change | Up about 60 percent |
| Main suppliers | Spain and Italy, about 90 percent |
| Next supplier | Turkey, about 5 percent |
Put that beside the size of the country and the proportions get comic. India’s edible oil market is counted in millions of tonnes a year, and olive oil is a rounding error inside it, sold to urban middle class and wealthy households in the big cities and almost unknown elsewhere. Which is exactly why exporters like the story: the base is so small that any adoption at all looks like a boom.
The duty cut that started it
The turning point was fiscal, not culinary. The Indian Olive Association was formed in 2007 as the industry body for producers, importers and consumers, and within a year it had persuaded the government to cut import duty on olive oil from 40 to 45 percent down to a flat 7.5 percent across all grades.
That single decision moved olive oil from unthinkable to merely expensive in Indian kitchens, and it is the reason Spanish and Italian companies started setting up Indian subsidiaries rather than shipping through distributors. Portugal has been making its own approaches, and Turkey is selling into the same shelf.
What is actually being sold
Here is the part that gets skipped. The oil growing fastest in India is not extra virgin. It is refined olive oil, often sold as light or extra light, which has been deodorized and stripped of most of its flavor and much of its phenolic content so that it does not fight with spices, and which suits deep frying and the Indian pan better than a green Tuscan oil would.
Borges, which set up an Indian subsidiary and is rolling out to dozens of cities this year, says openly that it created an extra light variant for consumers who want the goodness of olive oil without the aroma and flavor interfering with the spices. That is an honest answer to a real problem of cuisine, and it also means the health argument being used to sell the oil applies mostly to a grade that Indian buyers are not choosing.
- Refined grades carry a fraction of the polyphenols that the health studies were done on.
- Light and extra light are descriptions of flavor and color, not calories.
- Extra virgin still sells in India, mostly for salads, dressings and the export minded restaurant trade.
The competitive picture is not only European. Turkey is selling into the same shelf, and Indian projects to plant olives at home, in Rajasthan and elsewhere, have been running for a few years with state backing. None of them will supply this market at scale soon, but they explain why the exporters are in a hurry: a duty of 7.5 percent is a political decision, and a country that grows its own olives eventually revisits decisions like that.
For now the numbers stay small enough that one supermarket chain deciding to stock olive oil in another twenty cities moves the national import figure by a tenth. That is worth remembering the next time a presentation calls India the fastest growing olive oil market in the world. It is true, and the base is 4,187 tonnes.
When a new market opens, the first grade through the door is almost always refined. It travels better, it costs less, it does not argue with local cooking, and it lets a brand build volume while the consumer learns the word olive. The catch is that the marketing keeps quoting research done on virgin oil. If you are buying in a market like this one, the word to look for is virgin, and the word to distrust is light.