1. Introduction

Olive oil has capitalised on world demand for healthy vegetable oils in recent decades, its production trebling from 1 million tonnes in 1958/1959 to around 3.4 million tonnes in 2011/2012. Nowadays, production and consumption are spread much more widely across the world than just two decades ago, although they are still highest in the EU. The International Olive Council (IOC), an intergovernmental organisation responsible for administering the International Agreement on Olive Oil and Table Olives negotiated at United Nations commodity conferences, is responsible for establishing the designations and definitions of olive oil. The members of the IOC – currently 43 countries plus observers of other intergovernmental, governmental and non-governmental organisations – adopt international rules and standards to determine the quality of the products on sale and to monitor international trading. The methods recommended in the IOC trade standard have been developed in three ways. Some have been developed by the ISO or the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), and their applicability to olive oil has been checked by the group of chemists representing the laboratories that collaborate with the IOC in studying methods of olive oil and olive-pomace oil analysis. Other methods have been developed by national bodies and approved by the IOC because they have been proven to be applicable to olive oil. Yet others have been drawn up in collaborative trials led by the IOC and approved after it has been demonstrated that their repeatability and reproducibility are acceptable; one example is the method for the organoleptic assessment of virgin olive oil.

The objective is to achieve the harmonious development of the world olive economy in terms of production, consumption and international trade. In recent years, trade has been increasingly stimulated by a growing awareness of the health-related properties of olive oil. In its campaigns to promote and expand world olive oil consumption, the IOC draws on the wealth of evidence of the effects of olive oil in preventing thrombosis and platelet aggregation and specific types of malignant tumours and the antioxidant effects of its minor components, as well as on other scientific research findings in the fields of nutrition, sensory assessment and gastronomy.