Hojiblanca Merges With Tierras Altas and Becomes Dcoop
Spain’s Hojiblanca cooperative group, already the world’s biggest producer of extra virgin olive oil, has merged with Granada’s Tierras Altas and renamed itself Dcoop. The members of both cooperatives approved the deal at their general meetings on Tuesday. Here is what the new group looks like, why growers keep merging, and what it means for the oil in your bottle.
What happened
The general assemblies of Hojiblanca and of Tierras Altas Aceites de Granada, a group of 15 olive oil mills, voted on October 1 to merge. The combined cooperative takes the name Dcoop, short for “de la cooperativa”, from the cooperative. It keeps Hojiblanca’s headquarters in Antequera, in Málaga province, and its management: José Moreno, an economist and farmer who has chaired Hojiblanca since 2000, is president, and Antonio Luque stays on as general manager.
Moreno said the new name was chosen to cover more territory and more activities. Olive oil and table olives remain the core, but the group also runs livestock and farm supply sections and is building up grain, and Moreno mentioned wine as well.
| Dcoop at launch | Figure |
|---|---|
| Virgin olive oil | More than 250,000 tons a year |
| Table olives | More than 67,000 tons a year |
| Members | About 65,000 farming families, in more than 100 cooperatives |
| Regions | Andalusia, Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura |
| Average turnover | More than €600 million |
Dcoop says it is the largest agri-food cooperative in Andalusia and the third largest in Spain by turnover, and that its oil output alone is equivalent to the entire production of Greece.
Why growers keep merging
Hojiblanca is itself the product of years of mergers between cooperatives in Málaga, Córdoba and Seville. The logic has not changed. A single village cooperative sells its oil in bulk to whoever is buying, at whatever the market pays that week. A group that controls a quarter of a million tons can store oil, choose when to sell, and sit across the table from the big bottlers and the supermarket chains as something closer to an equal.
It has also been reaching past the bulk market. In 2007 it went into a joint venture with Cargill for a bottling plant near Málaga, and a year ago it sold its Hojiblanca consumer brand and a bottling plant to Deoleo in exchange for a stake in the world’s largest olive oil bottler and seats on its board. Since that deal, the Hojiblanca brand on supermarket bottles has belonged to Deoleo, so a separate name for the cooperative also clears up some confusion.
What it means for buyers
For most shoppers, nothing visible changes. Very little cooperative oil reaches the shelf under the cooperative’s own name. It goes out in tankers to bottlers, blenders and private labels, in Spain and abroad. What changes is the balance of power behind the label. After a season in which Spain’s crop halved and prices swung hard, the growers’ side of the trade wants more say in what happens to its oil.
- A bigger seller can hold oil back when prices are weak instead of dumping it.
- Volume at this scale gives the cooperative real weight with bottlers and retailers.
- Dcoop still has to sell most of its oil to someone else’s brand, so the bottler remains the name you see.
The name on a bottle of Spanish extra virgin is usually a bottler’s or a supermarket’s, and the oil inside may come from a dozen cooperatives. Some big cooperatives do bottle a little of their own best oil. When you find one, it is often the closest thing to farm-gate oil you can buy in a supermarket, at a fair price, because nobody in the middle is paying for a famous name.
Sources
- Olive Oil Times: Hojiblanca Group Renamed Dcoop (October 1, 2013)
- Interempresas: Dcoop, nuevo nombre de Hojiblanca tras la fusión con Tierras Altas (October 2013)