Market Challenges in Italian Olive Groves

Despite the Italian olive oil production covers around 15% of the world total, ranking second after Spanish, demonstrating that Italian olive growing shows huge potentiality at the same time, it is suffering from a lack of competitiveness due to ancient structural problems: fragmentation, lack of strategic planning, high costs of production and, strong reliance on import. One problem above all, the market price of olive oil in Italy, and especially at the origin, often fails to adequately remunerate the production costs and therefore to ensure a fair income to companies that are often faced with a market in which the willingness of most consumers to pay for quality extra virgin olive oil is still scarce. This limit is strongly accentuated not only by the structure of the olive industry but also by the marketing policies in place in the large-scale retail trade, where olive oil is often treated as a commodity and used as a “coquette” product, creating confusion within the category, not facilitating a conscious choice and favoring low-quality oils of foreign origin, especially from Spain. The “mass” extra virgin olive oil sector has the leading market in Spain and the average price of Italian “mass” extra virgin olive oil is, however, higher than the Iberian one, therefore less competitive. Focus on enhancing olive oil quality attributes, such as biodiversity, certified productions, and high competence of operators represent the strong points on which the market challenges can be taken.