Olive Council Defends Closed Meeting on Olive Oil Testing
The International Olive Council held its annual meeting on olive oil testing behind closed doors in Madrid last week, and its executive director has now answered the charge that it shut out chemists from non-member countries. Here is what the meeting was for, what the critics said, what the Council replied, and why a quarrel about who sits in a room matters to anyone who buys extra virgin.
What happened
The Council’s group of chemistry experts, the people who advise it on how olive oil is analyzed, met at its Madrid headquarters for two days late last week. Asked who would attend, an IOC spokeswoman told Olive Oil Times that the meeting was strictly reserved for experts designated by member countries. About 40 were expected, and no observers were allowed in.
The agenda was technical but important. The group was to look at the results of collaborative trials, where laboratories in several countries run the same method on the same samples to see whether it gives reliable results. It was also to review new and existing methods meant to check the quality and authenticity of olive oil and olive pomace oil, and to set priorities for its future work.
In a blog post the same week, Tom Mueller, the American author of Extra Virginity, wrote that for the first time the Council was keeping out experts from countries that are not members. He named Richard Cantrill, technical director of the American Oil Chemists’ Society, and the Australian olive oil researcher Rod Mailer among those excluded, and said they had also been refused the meeting papers. He added that he had heard from a range of sources that the Council might reduce, or even eliminate, the use of taste panels in deciding which oil is extra virgin.
The Council’s answer
On Monday, March 26, executive director Jean-Louis Barjol replied in an opinion piece on the same site. His main points:
- All observers were barred, whether they came from member countries or not. The meeting was for official government representatives only.
- An organization that usually opens its meetings is entitled to hold a members-only session now and then.
- Observers were denied the documents for this particular meeting, not access to the Council’s website.
- The sensory testing method was not on the agenda, and the Council considers it an essential quality criterion. As proof, he pointed to its efforts to bring more panels into its proficiency tests and to help train new ones.
Mr Barjol also suggested the rumor about panels came from people who want to set up their own panel recognition scheme and push the Council out of that work.
Why a closed door matters
The timing is what made the story. The United States, which is not a member of the Council and is the biggest importer of olive oil outside Europe, is watching its own producers draft a federal marketing order with tighter grades and testing. Australia has published its own standard, which it says uses newer tests, and South Africa has said it will adopt it. The European Commission is reviewing its testing rules after an Italian call to lower the limit for alkyl esters in extra virgin. The methods agreed in Madrid tend to travel from there into trade standards, so countries outside the club have a direct interest in how they are chosen.
The taste panel sits at the center of all this. Chemistry can catch many defects and some kinds of blending, but under the Council’s rules it is a trained panel that decides whether a virgin oil is free of defects and fruity enough to be extra virgin. Big bottlers have long complained that panels are subjective and costly. Smaller quality producers see them as the only thing that stops tired oil being sold under the top grade. That is why a rumor about panels, even one the Council flatly denies, travels so fast.
In the trade, the grade on the label is only as good as the test someone is prepared to pay for. A method that is accurate but expensive tends to be used rarely, and a method that is cheap but blunt tends to pass almost everything. When you hear that a standards body is reviewing its methods, the useful question is not whether the new tests are clever, but whether anyone will actually run them on the oil in the shops.
For background on the book that put Mr Mueller in the middle of this, see Extra Virginity: Tom Mueller’s Book Takes On Olive Oil Fraud. The Council’s last big change to its chemistry was the alkyl ester limit, covered in IOC Turns 50 and Adds an Alkyl Ester Limit for Extra Virgin, and the American side of the argument goes back to Australia and US try to change olive oil standards.
Sources
- Olive Oil Times: Council Experts Scrutinize Olive Oil Testing Methods
- Olive Oil Times: IOC Keeps Non-Member Chemists Out of Annual Meeting
- Olive Oil Times: Jean-Louis Barjol, Olive Council Chemists’ Meeting Was Members Only