Slowdown in global demand? Depends on where!

More than 6 months ago, we pointed out the markets which did not seem to know the crisis: Brazil, China, Poland and Australia. Final data for 2011 seem to justify this claim, with the exception of Australia which has only seen a slowdown in its performance in the last 6 months. We do, however, a brief summary. The year 2011 has shown an increasing global demand for olive oil by almost 9 percent (see table below), reaching $ 4.5 billion.

But while the major world buyers (in the order Italy, USA, France and Germany) confirmed a trend almost similar to the dynamic of the world trend, in just three years Spain has become capable of disappearing from the top ten, losing as many as 6 positions Due to the severe economic crisis that is hitting hard the income of the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula.

As announced previously in this special ranking, we find for the first time China, able to grow for the second consecutive year at a dizzying pace (+72% compared to 2010).
But, if the actual low overall weight of China (it has only 3% of world market), on the one hand it forces us to indicate that market as the "market of the future", from the other side it requires us, now, here, and immediately to tell you "attention ladies and gentlemen, listen very well, do you want to make money? The right market for you is the Brazil! "

The real star of 2011 is undoubtedly Brazil. It became the fifth buyer in the world olive oil market, now next to overcome Germany and with a positive trend that seems to know no any stops. Infact, even in 2012 it started with a boom: in the first two months of the year the trend growth rate was 21.6% (compared to the same month last year) with positive forecasts also for the other months of the year.

The main beneficiaries seem to be particularly Spanish and Portuguese companies. The latter have reached a market share of 50% of total Brazilian imports,  even if the strong economic crisis affecting the Iberian Peninsula could encourage the competitors with new and interesting opportunities.

What's on olive oil

Dear IOBOOO readers,

dear olive oil enterpreneurs and producers, dear consumers and people interested in olive oil,

what is people actually searching for olive oil? This is a question that could take pages and pages for an answer, months of research and investigation. Surely, there is not an unique answer but several, depending how do you interpret the former generic question.
Here we present one of the many interpretations: we gave a look on  what kind of web-based researches people made in the last years on google.com, using key words as "olive oil", "organic olive oil", "extravirgin olive oil", etc. Why? Just to grasp what people is looking for on the web, how much do they search (or did), what are the latest more issued news about olive oil. Just keep reading and you will learn more.
Bests! The IOBOOO staff.

In the last month (referring to the date of this post), in the entire world, there were 49,500 queries (only on google.com) that used the (ENGLISH) words "extravirgin olive oil" (read carefully, "extravirgin" is one word).

The whole number of the queries containing the words "extravirgin olive oil" and "extra virgin olive oil" (including "evoo"), alone or combined with others, summed up to 1,629,467, in the last month. Quite interesting. Interesting is also that many other words were associated to refine the search, words that for us speak about what could be the interest of the person searching. For example, there were 659 different kinds of web search (meaning key words combinations) that included our three magic words.

For example, the only "extra virgin olive oil" queries were 110,000, and those somehow including also the word "organic" were 5,883 quite few compared to the rest (respectively  .36% and 5.35%).
Why should we care? Just to know what people is interested in when looking (and then thinking) to extra virgin olive oil.

Looking below, you can see how the numbers of queries changed over time during the last year and since 2004.





Where the interest came from? Geographically, the most interested region since 2004 is Singapore (score: 100), followed by US (85), Canada (65), Malesia (63), Australia (63), India (40), UK (39) Italy (10).

As for the areas of interest, Food and bevarages is the highest (50-75%) since 2004, while Health moved from 0-10% to 10-25% as average of the last 12 months. The other areas of interest are Beauty (0-10%), Arts and entertainment (0-10%), Trade and industry (0-10%), Purchasing (0-10%) - note as purchasing is quite low: does it mean there is no space for online sells?

Anyhow, we believe these data could be questionable, since we do not know exactly how google built them. Hence, we decided to download the raw data and to perform our own classification and interpretation.

Follow us, we will tell you more.

Brazilian olive oil

Dear beloved followers and readers of the International Olive Oil Observatory,
as you know, we already talked about olive oil in Brazil, mainly in our reports about international trade.
If we where depicting Brazil as one possible emerging market, given its booming economy and its increasing imports of olive oil (see our articles back of some months ago), here we are with the first Brazilian olive oil: Olivas do Sul owned by Josè Alberto Aued.
From what we read from its rich website and blog (read the full original text), this pioneer of olive oil counts some 23 hectares of olive orchard planted with arbequina, arbosana and koroneiki, harvested to mill some thousands liters of extravirgin olive oil.
The interest of Brazil for olive oil is also testified by Expo Azeite (give a look), an international fair that celebrates this year its 6th edition, that accounts for large international sponsorships (as Pieralisi), and that seems being fairly working to disseminate the culture of olive oil consumption.
We invite every body to keep looking at this interesting evolutions, we'll do the same.

Bests!

Major organic oil producer Kailis collapses

Dear all,
we report here the collapse of one of the largest organic olive oil producers in the World, Kailis olive oil, a company with a 2,000 hectares olive orchard in Australia. You can read it on ABC rural (November the 30th 2011):
http://www.abc.net.au/rural/news/content/201111/s3380140.htm

Kailis used to produce a real good quality organic olive oil as, if you do not trust our tasting abilities, you can judge by the prizes he won. The former article indicates in the European (namely Spanish and Italian) cheap olive oil Aussie imports the reason for Kailis to drop out.
May be. May be, it could be interesting to look at the cost structure of such a large orchard, for us to learn more about farm management (there's plenty of debate about efficiency). Or, may be, it could be interesting to understand how European competitors can bring cheap olive oil in Australia. In the mean while, the Italian Monini - Carapelli and other Italian brands are no longer Italian owned, as you certainly know- came out recently with its first Australian olive oil bottle, produced from some hundreds of hectares of olive trees in the "Down-under".

Interesting, isn't it?

Bests.