Walter Zanre told Sky News that wholesale olive oil prices had fallen in recent months but said supermarkets were refusing to follow suit.
“We brought prices down twice last year and it’s not all been passed on to the consumer, which is a huge frustration,” he said.
It follows a surge in the price of olive oil since 2022, after adverse weather in olive-growing countries led to poor harvests.
Spain, which produces almost half of the world’s olive oil, was hit by droughts and heatwaves in 2023 and 2024. The weather caused global olive oil production to fall by almost one million tonnes.
It caused higher prices for many well-known olive oils, including Filippo Berio, which uses a blend of oils from across Europe despite being an Italian brand.
The average price of a 500ml bottle of Filippo Berio has risen from £3.75 in 2022 to £7.50 now, according to the tracker Trolley.co.uk.
Tesco’s own-brand olive oil stands at £5.50 for 500ml. This is up from £5.20 this time last year, Trolley.co.uk data shows. The same-size bottle of Nicolas Alziari olive oil, at Waitrose, sells for £22.50.
The boss of Filippo Berio argued that prices should have come down rapidly for customers after stronger production more recently meant there was better availability of oil.
Obviously, supermarkets are charging what they are because they can. That’s how markets work, that supply, demand thing. Every individul supplier does their best to rip the consumer off – it’s the competition for the profits to be made which reduces prices.
On the other hand, brother harvested his olives (more for fun and exercise, but still) and was being paid €5 a litre at the mill. So on that own brand stuff there’s a 100% mark up, a 50% margin, including all the expenses of bottling, transport, the shop itself and so on. Seems reasonable enough to me.
Walt is obviously an expert in UK supermarkets. How Tesco and Sainsbury just rip the arse out of the shoppers without a care in the world, with no regard to Aldi and Lidl whose rock bottom prices mean their shops are deserted…
I shop at Aldi and Waitrose. However, Tesco has achieved its highest UK market share in over a decade (29.4% in late 2025) – driven by a successful value strategy, including Aldi price matches.
I’ve noticed the price of milk has just risen in Brisbane.
I was just thinking that, even if the Strait of Hormuz nonsense does blow over, they’ll certainly not lower it again. Indeed I’ve never seen it drop at all!!
It is ever thus. Commodity prices rise, supermarkets put the price up, commodity prices fall back, supermarkets ‘forget’ to drop their price again.
In 1990 wheat was about £110/tonne. Now it is about £175/tonne. An increase of 60% In the same time a loaf of bread has gone from about 50p a loaf to about £1-70. An increase of 240%.
Someone is making a LOT of money from food, but sure ain’t the farmers.
I am all for farmers making money, but the subsidies they receive tend to make me less sympathetic to their complaints…
a) there are no subsidies for food production any more (there are for not producing food, but thats a different argument).
b) even when there were food subsidies they were cheap in comparison to paying farmers the true cost of production. If wheat had kept up with inflation alone since 1990 it would be £275/tonne now. Imagine what the bread price would be then!
AIUI, the Basic Payment Scheme based on total acreage is still in operation, though it is being phased out by 2027. Meanwhile, the Sustainable Farming Incentive, the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, and capital grants for productivity and animal welfare, provide plenty of opportunities for snouts in the public sector trough. Enjoy!
“AIUI, the Basic Payment Scheme based on total acreage is still in operation, though it is being phased out by 2027.”
Its in operation in name only. I think the maximum anyone got out of it last year was £600. Maybe the same this year, not sure. Even if you had 10,000 acres. Labour pulled the plug on the BPS over a year ago. I think they left it in place nominally because if they’d abolished it entirely there might have been lawsuits. Reducing the payments to effectively nothing while keeping the scheme running on the other hand seems to pass the lawyers sniff test.
” Meanwhile, the Sustainable Farming Incentive, the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, and capital grants for productivity and animal welfare, provide plenty of opportunities for snouts in the public sector trough.”
The SFI pays you to not grow food, so if anything will increase the price of food as production falls. It has also been closed to any new entrants for about a year now. The CSS is not accepting any new applicants, and has largely been absorbed by the SFI. Capital grants are pretty useless, because a) they are all for things no one really needs, b) you still have to pay a large proportion of the cost yourself, and no-one has any money at the moment and c) all the suppliers of items covered by capital grants just put their prices up by 40% whenever their inclusion is announced, so the farmer is no better off anyway.
If you think there’s a fortune to be made out of farm and environmental subsidies, buy 100 acres (that’ll set you back £1m+) and see how you get on. You’ll be lucky if you clear 1% return. You be better off buying Tesco shares.
Supply and demand can change, different rates of efficiency improvement for different things.
Porn has fallen in price and that’s because of the cost of almost every part of it has crashed in price. Using digital video is far easier, so way cheaper. Distributing it is much cheaper than making tapes and driving them to shops. Internet retail is cheaper than shops. There’s one cost that hasn’t changed much, and that’s hiring talent. Which means the women are a huge chunk of the cost now.
If supermarkets were ripping everyone off, they would be making massive margins, but they are not. And, of course, if they were, anyone prepared to operate off lower margins could clean up.
And? Own brand is cheaper as you’d expect. Posh olive oil is more expensive, sometimes a lot more. What you buy depends on your budget and taste.
Quite so. But Berio is not high quality. It openly utilizes Tunisian olive oil as part of its standard global blending process. And, IIRC, it has faced legal challenges on the quality, marketing and chemical purity of its blends. (A lot of Tunisian olive oil is smuggled into Italy, AIUI.)
I once looked into importing olive oil, and the world’s best olive oils come from Spain–eg Oro Bailén from Andalusia.
Fillipo Berio is £12.50 a litre in Tesco, £10 on Amazon. You can buy a huge 5l bottle for £6/litre from Amazon.
I don’t think Tesco are taking the piss at that difference. There’s extra costs to shops over warehouses. A benefit for convenience.
Tesco’s own-brand olive oil stands at £5.50 for 500ml.
The biggest consumer rip-off with food and drink is heavily advertised brands. Some soft focus thing of plump Italian women in a rustic setting serving a massive family dinner to 3 generations. Whether it’s olive oil, Cognac or cheese, it’s no better than own brand. There’s a premium end that costs a bit (Hine XO, Godminster cheddar) that is better, but these don’t do a lot of advertising. A bit too niche and the reputation is spread by word-of-mouth.
We like that cheddar too. Maybe we should lay in a bit for the coming Trumpageddon.
While we’re on the subject, does Philly Cream Cheese store well? Indeed, wwaots, is there a cheaper but equally good competitor to Philly?
Black Bomber from Snowdonia too. And their red leicester is very good. And when you’re in the fallout shelter, you might want some Tracklements onion marmalade to go with it.
In the fallout shelter, I’d avoid the Black Bummer.
I thought there was some disease that was going to kill all the Oliver trees anyway…?
I buy fresh here, €20 for 4l…
Fagin?
Oooops!
I buy the supermarket’s own brands whenever they are available. There was a time, back when I was a nipper, when supermarket brands were cheap but a bit rubbish. Now the quality is usually as good and sometimes better and about half the price. You still can’t beat Kingsmill wholemeal bread though.
My wife and I now do the weekly shopping for her elderly parents. Their shopping list is very detailed and they always insist on specific brands for stuff. Fortunately they are not short of money but, to me, it still looks like just throwing money away.
They might as well spend it on good food and decent living. Inflation and Labour taxation means it’s pointless saving it and there are no pockets in a shroud, so they can’t take it with them.
You just have to pick and choose which items are not different in quality. My brother worked in the food manufacturing business, often the branded and own brand products were made on the same line with the same materials. The only difference was the label that went on the carton. Other times the difference in quality is significant, as I found with toilet paper.
It’s nearly always worth giving it a spin, because of the long-term payoff vs risk. You lose some, but the winners pay off for years. If you risk £12 on a bottle of vodka and if it works, you save £5 on every bottle. If you’re drinking a bottle a month, that’s £300 after 5 years, for a £12 gamble.
If a thing has a ton of marketing for it, someone else can probably make it without all the marketing and pass some savings to you.
Brilliant! Ragging on your retailers! Soothsayer Gamecock foresees a reduction in your shelf space.
The Mafia must be due to nick a couple of lorry loads right about now.
What is this obsession with olive oil? The dagos have it. Personally, I think it’s disgusting stuff. Fry anything in it & it’s contaminated with the taste. We do get some good fish here but what the Spanish do to it should be considered as a crime.
The classical liberal outcome is that there are no subsidies and only hobby farmers make losses and the pros make a profit for once. Headlines like “100,000 olive trees abandoned Oliete”, and “Italy alone, approximately 440 million olive trees now sit neglected” suggest that Tim’s brother is a rarer man, people are getting out of the game as it’s not worth the labour aches and pain and depopulated rural areas mean you can’t hire someone to do the labour.
Just a guess this is a factor in prices not coming down, as the loss making producers are coming out of the supply.
Pete’s doing it for fun. He’s got 9 acres of Spain and enjoys playing the peasnt. In the firm and secure knowledge that he gets to strut around the land and do stuff and also not have to be reliant on hte pittance of income that’ll get him. It’s for fun.
Not so long ago – decades only – there would have been people for whom 9 acres was riches, oooooh, riches. And the income from those olives would have been a major cash contributor to the annual househoold budget. Much of which would have been home grown peasantry rather than the cash nexus. One of the things that tells you that it was that small scale peasantry is that every village has an olive mill. So you can take in 50kg, 500kg, of olives and get the juice for a toll of it. But they are, gradually, closing down.
You’re right that the labour’s not there any more. Rural Spain – and to an extent, Portugal – is emptying out. Granny’s still here but the kids are in Lisbon, or Vauxhall, or on the cruise ships.
As to olive trees being abandoned etc. The old way was that they’d be scattered around. Almost in the hedgerows sometimes. All that means hand labour to harvest. Same with the almonds and the carob. Modern plantations/orchards are hundreds if not thousands of acres closely planted and carefully pruned to make mechanised methods work. Mechanical tree shaking and all. Weird looking machines TBH, look like a tractor but up 20ft to go across the top of the – pruned – trees. What is being abandoned is the old stock of widely dispersed trees. Often hundreds, some even thousands, of years old. Same with the almonds (but not, as far as I know, carob as yet).
A reasonable analogy about 440 million olive trees neglected is that of think of all those hand spinners left as mere ornaments on the mantlepiece now that Crompton’s Mule is really working…..
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Like many before, Bongo finds the site will not upload an image. Why oh why? Please can you look into this? Thanks.