A significant portion of Italy’s food fraud prevention efforts in 2024 focused on olive oil. According to the new report of the central inspectorate for quality protection and anti-fraud of agri-food products (ICQRF), more than 8,200 of 54,000 food inspections targeted vegetable oils, with most of them related to extra virgin olive oil.

Using a network of laboratories maintained by the inspectorate and its partner universities, ICQRF found that in nearly 15 percent of the samples taken, the declared contents of the containers did not match the actual contents.