the squeeze on olive oil

behind the marketing gloss is a food system struggling to keep pace with climate reality

Olive oil is entering a new era, and not a comfortable one. The numbers have been pointing in the same direction for months. The USDA now expects global olive oil production to fall to roughly 3 million metric tons, about a 10 percent decline from the previous crop year. That may not sound catastrophic at first glance, but for a system already strained by drought, heat, disease pressure, and rising labor costs, it is a structural crack. Consider the huge price spikes we saw in cocoa over the last two years were due, in part, to a 12% loss in harvest…

Spain sits at the center of that story. It is not just a producer. It is the backbone of the global supply, often accounting for 40 to 55 percent of the world’s olive oil depending on the year. And Spain has now gone through two consecutive poor harvests. The country is still recovering from severe drought in Andalusia, where many groves simply could not set fruit. Farmers report lower yields even on irrigated land because the heat arrived too early, too intensely, or too unpredictably. In a market this concentrated, Spain’s pain becomes everyone’s problem.

Turkey is experiencing its own collapse, with production expected to fall to about 310,000 tons, far below last year’s peak of 475,000 tons. Combine this with the scientific outlook and things feel even shakier. New research in Communications Earth and Environment shows that climate instability, especially the rapid shifts in temperature and rainfall that now define the Mediterranean basin, will continue to suppress production. The olive tree has always lived inside a narrow environmental window. We are forcing it out of that window faster than it can adapt.

When supply shrinks and demand stays flat or grows, cost becomes the immediate pressure point. Olive oil has already become more expensive at retail. But the deeper question is who is actually buying which kind of olive oil. Most consumers do not realize that a significant share of global olive oil volume isn’t much better than the brands in squeezy bottles. Much of the world’s olive oil is refined, bleached, and deodorized, to create a neutral product meant to behave like a commodity fat, not a finishing oil. It is cheaper, far more stable, and fills in the gaps when extra virgin supply tightens.

The finishing oils, the ones we drizzle on soups or keep in small bottles by the stove, are already a class marker. They require delicate fruit, careful milling, and cold extraction. They oxidize quickly and cannot be made from damaged olives. When yields fall, these are the products that disappear first or rise in price fastest. If climate volatility continues, extra virgin olive oil risks becoming even more of a luxury signal, something only certain households can treat as everyday.

Food systems always reveal their pressure points. In olive oil, the pressure is telling us that convenience packaging is the least of our concerns. The real story is the fragility behind the bottle. If we want finishing oils to remain accessible, we have to confront the structural forces destabilizing the groves themselves.