Italian Producers Wrap Up a Modest Season

Summary

The 2024/25 crop year in Italy has seen a decrease in olive oil pro­duc­tion by 25% com­pared to the pre­vi­ous sea­son, with the south of Italy being the most affected due to cli­mate change and pathogens. The Italian olive oil mar­ket is fac­ing chal­lenges such as declin­ing pro­duc­tion, high prices, and lack of con­sumer aware­ness, lead­ing stake­hold­ers to work on mod­ern­iz­ing the sec­tor and attract­ing younger, qual­i­fied indi­vid­u­als to the indus­try.

The 2024/25 crop year in Italy is approach­ing its end with an over­all yield of approx­i­mately 248,000 met­ric tons of olive oil. 

According to data from the Italian Association of the Edible Oil Industry (Assitol), this fig­ure marks a 25 per­cent drop com­pared to the pre­vi­ous sea­son. 

Spain, Greece and Portugal, on the other hand, have all seen their olive oil pro­duc­tion vol­umes grow con­sid­er­ably. 

In its note on the 2024/25 crop year, Assitol stressed the grow­ing impact of cli­mate change on Italian pro­duc­tion. 

See Also:2024 Harvest Updates

The south of Italy, includ­ing Puglia, Calabria, and Sicily, where drought and extreme heat­waves have become the norm in recent years, has been the most affected part of the coun­try.

In those areas, irri­gated olive groves are the excep­tion to the over­all trend of declin­ing pro­duc­tion, while pathogens, includ­ing Xylella fas­tidiosa, con­tinue to cur­tail over­all pro­duc­tion. 

Still, these regions are where the major­ity of Italian olive oil is pro­duced. 

According to data from the International Olive Council (IOC), Italy’s aver­age annual pro­duc­tion over the last ten sea­sons has not exceeded 260,000 tons. 

In the pre­vi­ous decade, that aver­age was over 432,000 tons. Ten years ear­lier, it had greatly exceeded the 600,000-ton thresh­old. 

“Lower Italian pro­duc­tion vol­umes com­pared to olive oil from other ori­gins gen­er­ate a price gap,” Anna Cane, pres­i­dent of the olive oil group at Assitol, told Olive Oil Times. ​“In the last two cam­paigns, when olive oil was scarce on all mar­kets, the product’s prices rose enor­mously.”

Anna Cane believes that through innovation, including the assessment of super-intensive farming systems and precision agriculture, declining olive oil production can be reversed.

“That was good news for Italian pro­duc­ers, as the price gap between the national prod­uct and other olive oils sold on the Italian mar­ket was at its min­i­mum,” she added. 

In this sce­nario, most Italian con­sumers opted for Italian extra vir­gin olive oil over for­eign ones. 

“Looking at the super­mar­ket shelf, even with prices so high, the Italian con­sumer showed a pref­er­ence for the Italian prod­uct,” Cane recalled. 

The sit­u­a­tion changed dra­mat­i­cally over the last year or so, as prices in key mar­kets, espe­cially Spain, dropped to pre-2022 lev­els, pri­mar­ily due to a much larger avail­abil­ity of the prod­uct.

At the same time, Italian extra vir­gin olive oil prices remained sig­nif­i­cantly higher; the gap began to widen rapidly again. 

“If you look at the data from May 2025, we can see the retail mar­ket for olive oil in Italy grow­ing by 24 per­cent, while sales of 100 per­cent Italian extra vir­gin olive oil dropped by 25 per­cent,” Cane said. 

The lat­est price quotes show Italian extra vir­gin olive oil on the Bari mar­ket, the country’s largest, sell­ing at €10 per kilo­gram. 

In Jaén, Spain’s bench­mark mar­ket, extra vir­gin olive oils are priced at €3.68 per kilo­gram. 

“When con­sumers in Italy are sur­veyed about olive oil, their first con­cern is sus­tain­abil­ity and prod­uct qual­ity. But then, when you look at what they place in their bas­kets, they buy the cheap­est option,” Cane said.

“That hap­pens because the con­sumer is not aware of the dif­fer­ences between prod­ucts,” she added. ​“Interestingly, in many for­eign mar­kets where the Italian prod­uct is given proper value, con­sumers are more aware of the qual­i­ties of high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil.”

However, this has not been the case in Italy, where the IOC esti­mates 395,000 tons of olive oil will be con­sumed in the 2024/25 crop year.

“In Italy, many tend to take extra vir­gin olive oil for granted in the house­hold and do not look closely at the product’s pro­file,” Cane said. ​“Labels on bot­tles can­not say every­thing, and con­sumers see extra vir­gin on prod­ucts with widely vary­ing qual­i­ties. That doesn’t help.”

Assitol and other stake­hold­ers in the olive oil sup­ply chain are col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty, and Forests to develop new responses to the chal­lenges posed by cli­mate change and a highly com­pet­i­tive inter­na­tional mar­ket. 

“The min­istry will pro­vide finan­cial resources to sup­port this effort,” Cane said. ​“The focus will be on inno­va­tion in agri­cul­ture and olive cul­ti­va­tion.” 

“By inno­va­tion, I mean many things. Where pos­si­ble, assess­ing the poten­tial for inten­sive and, in some cases, even super-inten­sive farm­ing sys­tems, as well as adopt­ing pre­ci­sion agri­cul­ture to ensure opti­mal use of inputs, from water to plant pro­tec­tion prod­ucts, fer­til­iz­ers and more,” she added. ​“The goal is to opti­mize both pro­duc­tion and har­vest­ing.”

One of the defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of Italian olive farm­ing is that most farms are very small, with orchards aver­ag­ing less than two hectares. 

This struc­ture makes it chal­leng­ing to share inno­v­a­tive efforts or imple­ment shared field tech­nolo­gies. Additionally, a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of olive oil pro­duc­tion is con­sumed inter­nally or occurs in remote areas with geo­graph­i­cal and logis­ti­cal con­di­tions that chal­lenge prof­itabil­ity.

“We can­not change the con­di­tion of olive farm­ing in the coun­try, but we could do a lot to aggre­gate the prod­uct. I’m think­ing, for instance, of the pos­si­ble estab­lish­ment of high-qual­ity mod­ern stor­age cen­ters where pro­duc­ers could con­ve­niently store their extra vir­gin olive oil,” Cane said. 

See Also:Discounted Olive Oil Offers in Italy Spark Concerns Over Quality, Fair Pricing

Such sup­port would allow even small pro­duc­ers to avoid sell­ing their entire pro­duc­tion imme­di­ately after har­vest. 

They could instead store it and man­age sales based on mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ties rather than being forced by a lack of infra­struc­ture. 

Additionally, their pro­duc­tion could be com­bined with that of oth­ers with sim­i­lar char­ac­ter­is­tics, thereby enhanc­ing the mar­ket value of all involved batches. 

“This would add value not only for the seller but also for the buyer,” Cane said. ​“If a com­pany needs spe­cific vol­umes, it can­not source from scat­tered lots, three tons here, ten tons there.” 

Such logis­ti­cal frag­men­ta­tion can hin­der key aspects of the olive oil mar­ket, includ­ing qual­ity con­trol and con­sis­tency. 

Given the grow­ing impact of cli­mate change, mod­ern, effi­cient irri­ga­tion is increas­ingly seen as essen­tial to main­tain­ing both pro­duc­tion vol­umes and qual­ity. Still, tra­di­tional orchards in Italy are, for the most part, rain­fed. 

“Today, irri­ga­tion is cru­cial. But given how tra­di­tional olive farms are struc­tured in Italy, many olive groves lack access to it,” Cane said. ​“As impor­tant as irri­ga­tion is, it’s even more impor­tant not to waste the water we have.”

“That means hav­ing sys­tems that can pre­cisely mea­sure actual water needs, the air and the tree,” she added. 

According to Cane, many farm­ers and stake­hold­ers are inno­vat­ing and net­work­ing on this issue, even in a highly frag­mented coun­try. 

Still, progress must occur within a sec­tor that is still dom­i­nated by aging farm­ers, tra­di­tion­ally less inclined toward tech­no­log­i­cal and inno­v­a­tive prac­tices. 

According to ISMEA, the Italian Institute for Agricultural and Food Market Services, the nearly 620,000 enti­ties involved in olive oil pro­duc­tion are, for the most part, run by older indi­vid­u­als. 

“They are well over 50 years old on aver­age. Generational change is cru­cial. We need not only to attract young peo­ple to olive farm­ing but to ensure they are qual­i­fied,” Cane said. ​“That is essen­tial because it trans­forms the entire approach.” 

“Twenty or 30 years ago, when I vis­ited Chile, where the olive sec­tor was just begin­ning to grow, I saw engi­neers work­ing in mills and agron­omy grad­u­ates run­ning pro­duc­tion,” she added.

ISMEA ini­tia­tives aimed at encour­ag­ing gen­er­a­tional renewal align with recent events and meet­ings pro­moted by Assitol and the Ministry for Enterprises and Made in Italy (MIMIT). 

“What is emerg­ing is the urgent need for spe­cial­ized train­ing in these pro­fes­sions,” Cane said. ​“A sim­ple exam­ple is pruners. ​“It’s become very dif­fi­cult to find pruners in Italy. And if you look at the olive oil mills, find­ing qual­i­fied per­son­nel is also hard.” 

According to Assitol, tar­geted train­ing is needed for every phase of the sup­ply chain. 

“Think of blend­ing experts, who are increas­ingly essen­tial. There is no school for that,” Cane said. ​“So we have to train them in-house, but there are very few. And once they’re trained, they tend to stay in the same role. That makes rota­tion dif­fi­cult, even for them.” 

Assitol believes that new strate­gies and tools should drive the trans­for­ma­tion and mod­ern­iza­tion of the sec­tor. 

“In some cases, it’s about updat­ing exist­ing knowl­edge. In oth­ers, it’s about foun­da­tional edu­ca­tion. We are cur­rently engag­ing with sev­eral major agri­cul­tural insti­tutes,” Cane said. 

In the wine sec­tor, Italy boasts a high level of spe­cial­iza­tion, with ded­i­cated agri­cul­tural insti­tutes that also offer uni­ver­sity-level courses. 

“We don’t have any­thing like that for the olive oil sec­tor. There are a few ini­tia­tives in some insti­tutes now, but they are still very lim­ited,” Cane said. 

She added that the strengths of the Italian olive oil sec­tor remain rec­og­nized world­wide, and there is much that this can pro­pel. 

“The unique Italian bio­di­ver­sity, the acknowl­edged fine qual­ity of our pro­duc­tion… Made in Italy, in a sense, is itself a global brand, with no rivals,” Cane said.

“Looking at the big pic­ture, what we need is a new cul­tural mind­set, and that can also be very stim­u­lat­ing [for the new gen­er­a­tions],” she added.