A year ago the world’s largest olive oil company was clear that it was going to continue expensive. Now he has just shown up
In 2022 deoleo, the largest marketer of olive oil in the world, He won 5.5 million euros of benefits. In 2023, lost 34. It is the best metaphor of the earthquake that the olive oil industry has lived in recent years. Above all, because we are not talking about a lost oil mill in Sierra Morena, we talk about the bottling brands such as Hojiblanca, Carbonell or Koipe. Therefore, if we are interested in olive oil, we must follow them closely. One year of transition. During 2023, drought, a short harvest and the increase in costs (derived from the situation in Ukraine, the inflationary scenario and high interest rates) caused a very serious problem in the oil. We know that well. The problem is that, although They themselves recognized that they had transferred “partial (mind) to customers the increase in prices experiments throughout the chain”, it had not been enough. And that deoleo was (at least, on paper) one of the marketers that More margins had for the ‘premium’ positioning of its brands. 2024 was, then, the year of transition. What happens is that ransition has been faster than anyone expected. In fact, I was not sure what was going to happen. And, at some point, they bet because prices They were going to stay up. His analysis said that if prices at origin did not fall sufficiently, the industry would have to contain the decrease of finalist prices (or expose to bankruptcy). That It is something that has happened: prices at origin have collapsed, while in supermarkets the descent is being very soft. However, with estimates that They tell us 1.4 million tons They have already realized that there is no way to contain the price in the medium term. Preparing for 2025. Hence Víctor Roig, general director in Spain of Deleo, has explained that “the logical thing is that this returns the price of the Aove to levels similar to those of 2021 and 2022, standing between three and four euros per liter.” In this context, the battle has begun to be another. Recover the oil culture. In the last decade, the consumption of olive oil It has been falling year after year. Crisis after crisis (and with the mediation of A deep cultural and gastronomic change), wide layers of the population have dropped from olive oil and the vast majority of them have not returned. It is true that demand has not fallen into that same proportion That prices have grown. But consumption has decreased 44.5% Less in the last three years and, following the previous logic, nobody knows if the industry will recover it. And if in recovering from the losses there was a short -term survival of the industry, in bringing all those consumers back is the future. Image | Vincent Eisfeld | Senate agency In Xataka | Spain faces its greatest agricultural challenge of the century: turn 1,901,529 hectares of olive grove before it is late
