“Liquid Gold”: The Great Olive Oil Shortage of 2024
If 2023 was the warning, 2024 was the reckoning. Olive oil reached genuinely unprecedented prices, and in some places it became the thing people locked up — a luxury good rather than a kitchen staple.
What happened
After a second failed Spanish harvest, prices hit records: olive oil reached around €9 a kilo at the wholesale level in early 2024, roughly double its old normal. Spain’s crop had been cut in half by drought; in some countries supermarket prices more than doubled in three years, and there were reports of shops tagging or chaining bottles against theft.
Why it matters
For the first time in living memory, ordinary households treated olive oil as a luxury — rationing it, switching to cheaper oils, or buying suspiciously cheap “extra virgin” that almost certainly wasn’t. It was a real-world demonstration of everything this site bangs on about: that good oil is expensive to make, that the climate is squeezing it, and that scarcity breeds fraud.
When oil is this dear, the smart moves aren’t glamorous. Cook with a cheaper, honest oil and save your good extra virgin for raw finishing, where you actually taste it — a little goes far. Don’t chase a bargain “premium” bottle; at these prices, cheap-and-fancy is a red flag. And store what you buy properly so none of that costly oil goes stale. Liquid gold deserves to be treated like gold.
Sources, 2024: CNBC, “Liquid gold: An olive oil shortage…”; BBC News.