Sunday, March 10, 2013

Truth in Olive Oil

It started out as a quest to find high quality oil at a cheap price. And it has become a learning experience. So I found this website, called Truth in Olive Oil, which has a lot of great information about olive oil. I have not read every page, but one thing I learned is that Veronica Foods is a large supplier of premium olive oil nation-wide. They work with a lot of small specialty shops. The other thing I learned is that UC Davis did some comparison testing of major brand olive oil like Bertolli and Colavita and the results are not good. Here are the UC Davis results. 

http://www.olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/publications/Restaurants-and-Foodservice.pdf 
http://www.olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/files/report%20041211%20final%20reduced.pdf 

http://www.olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/publications/olive%20oil%20final%20071410%20updated.pdf 

The reason for all of this investigation is that it's very hard to find high quality olive oil that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. The local specialty shop in Denver (supplied by Veronica Foods) charges almost $60 per liter. For the amount of olive oil I use, that's just too much money. And I wrote a short post about Trampetti which claims to be organic olive oil, and seems legit, but without secondary verification it's hard to know who to trust. The price, however, is fantastic at $20 per liter. Almost too good to be true.

So how can I know which olive oil to trust? There are 2 types of tests, chemical and organoleptic. Organoleptic are the subjective tests related to taste, smell, color, the consumption experience, etc. akin to the way wine is rated. And while important in rating quality oil, the chemical analysis is where it's at to prove that the oil you paid a small fortune for, is indeed extra virgin olive oil. Unfortunately, getting chemical test results for olive oil is very difficult for 3 reasons: not every producer or supplier gets the oil tested, even if the producer or supplier does test the oil - very few producers publish the results, and the tests are expensive.


Because of this, I started contacting anyone and everyone I could think of to see if I could get chemical statistics on the oils that I wanted to buy including Trampetti. It has been hard to say the least. Most people don't even return my emails, and the people that do usually say that they won't release that info, even if they have it.


Which brings us full circle to the Truth In Olive Oil website. Veronica Foods is mentioned on the site a lot. So I thought, why not contact them since I had emailed everyone else? After a couple emails, the owner of Veronica Foods, Veronica Bradley, talked with me on the phone for a few minutes about olive oil. She commiserated with my problem but also gave me a reason for hope. UC Davis is expanding their test lab and will get up to the same standard as the Australian Oils Research Laboratory where Veronica Foods gets all of their samples done. Once that is complete, then the U.S. will have a world class level testing system to guarantee the quality of oil. Of course it will be used to promote California oils, but if they are good, who cares? Until then, the lab in Australia is the only place that can be trusted and that does tests for all 6 important categories: polyphenols, free fatty acids, peroxides, oleic acid, diacylglycerols (DAGs), and pyropheophytins (ppp).


Because Veronica Foods is committed to wholesaling high quality oil, most if not all of the stores they supply have the chemical stats available, and that is only because VF pays for the testing. But as a retail consumer, you are also going to pay the price. 


So I am back to the drawing board. Hopefully, someday I will be able to get the oil I want to buy tested. 

No comments:

Post a Comment