Olive Oil and Agromafia on 60 Minutes

On Sunday, 60 minutes aired a segment about the Agromafia in Italy. Of specific interest to us was all the information they discovered about adulterated olive oil and fake olive oil coming out of Italy. If you haven’t seen it yet, the main video is only 13 minutes, you can watch it below – or click here to go to the cbsnews.com site to see the 60 Minutes Overtime videos as well as the Agromafia video.

Some things we thought were super interesting from that video:

The tasting panel was really cool! One of the very interesting things a lot of people don’t know about the standards set for Extra Virgin Olive Oil is that they can not have any taste defects. So, if an oil tastes ‘funny’, ‘off’, or ‘rancid’ right out of the bottle, it’s clearly not Extra Virgin. Our Ultra Premium olive oils actually have minimum standards for fruitiness, bitterness, and pungency – on top of the requirement that they can not have any taste defects.
Tom Mueller saying that up to 80% of the Olive Oil sold in the United States labeled Extra Virgin is, in fact, fraudulent – either not extra virgin or straight up not even olive oil!
How easy it is for fake olive oil to be made using a seed oil and adding a little bit of chlorophyll and beta-carotene. It’s incredible how much it looked like real olive oil after just a few seconds of stirring in extra chemicals!