Few ingredients are more essential to American cooks today than olive oil. And none is more affected by geopolitics.
That’s because the United States consumes more olive oil than any other country except Italy, but produces very little of it. About 97 percent of the olive oil sold in America is imported, most of it from Spain and Italy.
So President-elect Donald J. Trump’s repeated vows to impose hefty tariffs on imported goods have unsettled the $14 billion global industry. Mr. Trump sees tariffs as a twin-engine machine that can be used both to protect American businesses from competition and to punish uncooperative trading partners — and he has used them against European olive oil producers before.
But many olive oil producers say tariffs will force them to raise prices at a time when Americans are already reeling from inflation at the grocery store. Since 2021, the average price of a liter of olive oil at an American supermarket has nearly doubled, from about $10 per liter to nearly $20, according to the Nielsen research firm.
Mr. Trump hasn’t specified which products, or countries, will be subject to tariffs, though he has threatened to impose a 25 percent tariff on all imports from Canada and Mexico. During his first administration, olive oil bottled in Spain — which supplies nearly half of the world’s olive oil — was subject to a 25 percent tariff as part of a continuing trade dispute. Under President Biden, that tariff was suspended in 2021, but could be reinstated.
“It’s clear Trump thinks that tariffs are a very useful tool and he’s going to use them,” said Joseph Profaci, executive director of the North American Olive Oil Association, a promotional group funded by both domestic and international producers. “I’m not going to say that he’s wrong, but we now have an opportunity to try to persuade him that olive oil really shouldn’t fit into that scheme of economic policy.”
The talk of tariffs comes just as producers around the world who export olive oil to the United States were taking their first easy breaths since March 2020, when the global shutdown of the hospitality industry in response to Covid-19 sent demand plummeting.
Before the pandemic, U.S. sales of olive oil had hit a new peak, quadrupling between 2000 and 2020 from 100,000 to 400,000 metric tons. But in both 2021 and 2022, the Mediterranean region — especially Spain, which produces 45 percent of the world’s olive oil — experienced extreme heat and drought that devastated the harvest and pushed prices up. Worldwide consumption dropped precipitously.
This year, the outlook was brightening. The 2024 harvest in the Mediterranean region, which begins in September, has been strong (except in Italy, where the pathogen Xylella fastidiosa continues to kill off millions of trees each year). Significantly lower prices were predicted to take effect this winter, when the new oil will arrive in markets everywhere.
Then Mr. Trump was re-elected, upending expectations for 2025 and beyond. If tariffs go into effect, will they improve the outlook for American producers and consumers?
Samantha Dorsey, who has managed the pioneering California producer McEvoy Ranch in Petaluma for 23 years, said the company supports any government policy that helps farmers and promotes American food security. But she doesn’t see any immediate benefit for domestic olive oil producers from tariffs.
“This kind of change takes longer than one election cycle to accomplish,” she said.
This is partly because olive trees are slow growers; it takes at least five years from planting for a tree to bear full fruit, so ramping up production would take time (though such efforts are underway in California, Texas and Georgia, among other places). More than tariffs, she said, the cost of domestic olive oil is affected by inflation, rising labor costs and climate change around the world.
A giant global producer like Filippo Berio is better protected from the vagaries of markets, climate and geopolitics. Marco DeFeo, the company’s head of U.S. marketing, said the company learned during the last Trump administration to maintain robust sources outside the European Union.
In the previous round of tariffs, only bottled oil was taxed, but bulk oil was exempt. So Filippo Berio, which has bottling plants in the United States, could bring in oil from all over the world, including from its growers in Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey (places that had a banner year), and all of those would be exempt from tariffs.
Leandro Ravetti is the technical director of Boundary Bend, an Australian producer that began making olive oil in California in 2014. Its Cobram Estate extra-virgin oil has been marketed aggressively, scooping up prizes and quickly making the company one of the biggest producers in the United States. He said the European Union’s subsidies for agriculture, and its prohibitive import fees, create an unfair advantage in the global market.
“If we want to sell our California oil or our Australian oil in Europe, not only we are competing against a subsidized price, but also we have to pay extra,” he said. “All we want is a level playing field.”
Skyler Mapes disagrees, saying tariffs would be unfair to small European producers, who receive no subsidies. Ms. Mapes is the co-founder of Exau, a quarterly olive oil subscription service that sells directly to North American consumers. She and her husband, Giuseppe Morisani, divide their time between Austin, Texas, and his native Calabria, where they produce organic extra-virgin oil on his family farm. They have just finished their seventh harvest; the olives are at the mill, or frantoio, waiting to be crushed and bottled.
“There’s no way we can hurry up the process to ship in advance of the inauguration,” she said.
Ms. Mapes said tariffs could actually punish producers in the United States because state-of-the-art milling technology is produced only in Europe. Importing necessary equipment like two-phase extractors and malaxers would become prohibitively expensive. (Malaxing is the process of kneading the paste of crushed olives to release the oils; it is also used for extracting buttermilk from butter.)
Mr. Profaci of the North American Olive Oil Association said his group was contemplating an effort to have olive oil reclassified as a fresh product, like orange juice, that could be exempt from tariffs, and looking to corresponding groups, like the Hass Avocado Board and the Mango Board, for recent lessons on marketing an imported food as an American staple.
Mr. Ravetti and other producers said that if the federal government really wanted to help domestic producers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture could create legally enforceable standards for olive oil, similar to existing ones for butter and other foods, that help keep adulterated or substandard products off the market. (Australia implemented such a system in 2011.)
Fraud has long been rampant across the industry. In the United States, any brand can use packaging that suggests a premium product while bottling cheap or even rancid oil, from anywhere in the world.
“The temptation is always there” for bad actors, he said. “They are looking at an expensive product that is relatively easy to get adulterated or bought at a cheaper price, and selling it with very little risk of consequences.”
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