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Imagine being told that the premium olive oil bottle sitting in your kitchen cupboard could be a complete fake? You might think that's an exaggeration, but the figures exposing olive oil fraud are genuinely alarming.
Cases of olive oil fraud have been steadily rising, with several reports emerging over the past year alone. Portuguese authorities recently announced they had seized more than 16,000 litres of counterfeit cooking oil falsely labelled as olive oil, along with 82,000 fake labels.
This isn't just a European problem – it's happening right in front of us across the world. Italian police confirmed they had dismantled a criminal gang that was blending low-quality oils with chemicals and selling them as extra virgin olive oil, posing a risk to consumer safety and undermining Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) and Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) certifications.
Remarkably, forecasts suggest the rate of such incidents in the olive oil market will rise by 166%. Think about that – it means the figures could more than double within a single year.
The financial incentives are enormous. Arsen Khachaturyants, CEO of Arsenio, says: "You can sell a 500ml bottle of olive oil for between 20 and 70 euros."
He adds: "Fraudsters see an opportunity there, simply by slapping an olive oil label on the product, or classifying it as extra virgin." With that kind of money on the table, it's no surprise criminals are drawn to it. But what really worries me is that food fraud has become far more sophisticated, with methods now used to alter product properties at the molecular level – techniques that often outpace current detection capabilities or require prohibitively expensive technology to catch.
We are no longer dealing with simple tricks, but with high-tech operations capable of fooling even the experts.
Source: MSN