Why Olive Oil Prices Spiked
Olive oil hit record prices in 2023–24, and the reason was old-fashioned: the weather. But the full story is more interesting than “a bad harvest” — and it says a lot about where the world’s olives actually grow.
It really was the weather
Across 2022–2024, severe drought and record-breaking heat hit the major Mediterranean growing countries, Spain worst of all. Spain is the largest olive-oil producer on earth by a wide margin, and in the worst years its harvest roughly halved. Less oil, steady demand, and the price climbed to record highs — in many markets it more or less doubled. No conspiracy, no cartel. Just heat, drought, and a tree that only fruits once a year.
Why one region’s weather moves the whole world’s price
Here is the part worth getting right, because it is widely misunderstood. Olives are not grown around a single sea. They are now grown on five continents: California, Texas and Arizona in the United States; Australia and New Zealand; Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Peru in South America; South Africa; and of course around the Mediterranean. The Southern Hemisphere even harvests in the opposite season — their autumn is our spring — so the world gets fresh oil twice a year.
But here is the catch. The Mediterranean basin still presses the great majority of the world’s olive oil — Spain alone is around 40% of global supply in a normal year, with Italy, Greece, Tunisia, Turkey, Morocco and Portugal making up most of the rest. The newer producing countries are real, growing, and often excellent — but they are still too small a share of total volume to cover a collapse in the Spanish harvest. So when the Mediterranean has a bad year, the entire world feels it at the till, no matter where its own bottle was pressed.
The spread of olive growing is slowly loosening that grip. As California, Australia, Chile and the others scale up, a single Mediterranean drought stings a little less than it used to — and the counter-seasonal harvest is a genuine gift: an Australian or Chilean oil pressed in May is the freshest extra virgin on a Northern-hemisphere shelf all summer, when the Spanish oil is nearly a year old. If you want a fresh oil out of season, look south.
The takeaway for your bottle
Two things. In a drought year, a suspiciously cheap bottle deserves a hard look — someone in the chain cut a corner, and it is worth knowing how olive oil gets cut and what a real bottle actually costs. And second: pay attention to origin and harvest date, not just price. The world’s olives come from more places than ever — use that.