Refillable olive oil decanters in bars in Spain will be banned within days after the Ministry of Agriculture announced it will shortly (this or next week?) present legislation.
This is despite the fact that the previous initiative, by the EU, collapsed after the UK´s David Cameron used the initiative to highlight EU waste and micromanagement.
Spain says that it considers the “fraud” of using low quality olive oil on tables to be a major consumer issue.
Bollocks. Who, outside of a Michelin star restaurant, ever cared about that?
It´s the few larger olive oil companies lobbying for non-refillable bottles (they will have the same widget as the bottles of booze you buy in Spain) so they can push out all the local producers, who can´t afford the fancy bottles and will thus have to withdraw from the consumer market, instead selling their production to the large cooperatives.
We´ll know more once the legislation is published, but shortly olive oil decanters will vanish, to be replaced by impossible-to-open-without-spilling sterilised single use monodosis capsules, or funny looking branded bottles which will spill at right angles when poured.
The Junta de Andalucia, together with the Andalucia Olive Oil Distribution Federation, says it is broadly in favour of the move.
So now my local restaurant will have to buy expensive oil instead of using his own delicious product.
How does that benefit the customer ?
Methinks more skulduggery might be afoot ?
Put these people who have the time to dream up this sort of crazy legislation to work solving important issues. Not wasting time and money on matters that nobody really cares about.
Yes but what reason do they give? Is it for health (contamination?)
Would this be a workaround? Put a can /bottle on the counter and fill individual jugs from it (or cups or glasses if buying jugs is too expensive).
Sorry, forgot that the ostensible reason is low quality oil, health doesn’t come into it. The workaround won’t work for that as they could say that unscrupulous bars would fill expensive cans with cheap products. But then the answer to that would be to only sell local products and make it illegal to sell top quality/price products 😀
There is a huge market in fraudulent olive oil, apparently mafia led. Olive oil mixed with lamp oil and packaged to look like expensive olive oil. It has been well covered in the press. It is practically impossible to tell the difference between the real product and the counterfeit from the packaging. This is a serious problem and this was an attempt as a counter measure against fraud to protect consumers. Personally, whilst I would be sad to see table top bottles disappear, i would rather that than risk my health by drinking lamp oil.