“Expensive extra virgin olive oil…turns out it’s industrial?” Europe is excited

A group of people playing around with ‘food’ were also arrested in Spain and Italy. These are 11 people who sold the lowest grade olive oil, which is unsuitable for human consumption, by passing it off as high-quality edible olive oil.

According to the American daily New York Times (NYT) on the 4th (local time), Spanish and Italian police authorities raided their workplaces in Sicily and Tuscany, Italy, and Ciudad Real, Spain last month.

In the process, the police confiscated about 260,000 liters of oil that the gang was selling under the guise of high-quality olive oil. It was revealed that the oil confiscated by the police was of the ‘lampante’ grade, the lowest grade of olive oil, considered unsuitable for human consumption due to its high acidity.

According to the NYT, Lampante oil has long been used for fuel and industrial purposes, not for food.

Police from both countries also confiscated about 91,000 euros (about 129 million won) in cash and bills belonging to the 11 arrested members.

According to NYT, European police authorities have been intensively cracking down on fraud using food ingredients such as olive oil, beef, and seafood. In Europe, scams such as selling horse meat by misrepresenting it as high-quality beef or mixing it with high-quality spices such as saffron and selling it with impurities are prevalent.

In particular, olive oil is one of the foods most frequently involved in fraud. According to the 2022 European Union (EU) report, the food with the most requests for food fraud investigations in Europe in 2019 was olive oil.

In particular, cases of fraud were found to be frequent in Spain and Italy, major producers of olive oil. According to ‘Olive Oil Times’, a specialized media outlet covering the olive oil industry, over the past year, Italian police have caught 2.3 million liters of low-grade olive oil while trying to sell it by passing it off as the highest grade ‘extra virgin’.