Italy's olive oil prices halve as Europe's harvest grows

Olive oil prices in Italy have fallen by almost half in a year, and record stocks sitting in warehouses show why.

The national average price for extra virgin olive oil stood at €4.75 a kilo in the week of 12 October, down 48% from the same week last year, according to a market digest built on ISMEA pricing data. A week earlier the price touched €4.37 a kilo, the lowest level recorded since July 2022.

Milan-based analysts at Areté put the drop at 47% over the past year. In an analysis published by Il Sole 24 Ore on 9 October, they tracked the gap between Italian and benchmark EU prices as it collapsed from more than €5,300 a tonne in June 2024 to just over €900 a tonne in September 2026.

Two expensive years are over for the one ingredient every kitchen in Europe buys by the litre.

Record stocks push olive oil prices down

Italy's olive oil inspectorate, ICQRF, recorded 195,044 tonnes in storage at the end of September, the close of the 2025/26 season, against 132,951 tonnes a year earlier — a rise of 46.7%. Extra virgin oil alone accounted for 150,203 tonnes of that total, up 66.9% on September 2025.

Il Sole 24 Ore attributes the glut mainly to restocking after two campaigns of production deficits in southern Europe, rather than to a sudden jump in Italy's own harvest. Mills and importers bought cautiously through 2024 and 2025 while Spanish and Greek output fell short; this year they appear to have filled the gap at once.

A bigger harvest across the region

Spain, the world's largest producer, is the main reason supply has turned around. The country's farm ministry put its first estimate for the 2026/27 campaign at 1,602,596 tonnes on 1 October, 23% above the previous season; Spanish prices have already dropped enough to trigger a separate push for an EU storage rule from the country's main farm unions. Areté's own estimate puts the rise closer to 29%.

Greece shows a split market rather than a uniform collapse. Old-crop extra virgin has been changing hands at €3.20 to €3.75 a kilo, while early lots of new-crop oil from Laconia fetched €4.60 to €5.95 a kilo, as buyers paid a premium for guaranteed fresh stock even as last season's oil sold off cheap.

For restaurants, the relief is straightforward: olive oil is one of the few ingredients that got noticeably cheaper to buy this autumn, after two seasons in which it ranked among the fastest-rising items on a European kitchen's shopping list. For growers and mills still holding last season's oil, the same numbers mean selling into a market that keeps moving against them.

Spain's regional governments have until the end of October to revise their estimates, and Madrid is due to decide by mid-November whether to trigger the EU storage mechanism its farm unions are demanding. Either move could still shift where olive oil prices settle this winter.