Are Feroli (italy) and Olimp (Greece) legitimate brands of extra virgin olive oil?

Question

Are Feroli (italy) and Olimp (Greece) legitimate brands of extra virgin olive oil? I could not find any information on the Internet that has been censored in China. They are being sold on PDD, one of the biggest online ecommerce platforms in China, and the platform is probably not indexed by search engines. Thanks.

Answer 1

Olimp olive oil is an olive oil produced by Gold Line Group, an European olive oil company. Whether or not it is 100% Greek virgin olive oil is hard to determine; per the book Extra Virginity, the majority of olive oil sold in the world is fraudulent, and there are no reliable international certifications. But it's as likely to be real Greek olive oil as anything I would buy in the market here in the US.

Feroli, on the other hand, is not a company or brand of oil that exists outside China and Russia. Sometimes Chinese importers relabel real olive oil with brand names they feel are more marketable inside China, but your odds are poor. It is more likely that this is not real Italian olive oil, and it may not be olive oil at all.

Answer 2

I can’t say anything for sure about this particular brand, but there are a few phrases in your pictures that are likely questionable:

• ‘Olive Oil Product’ : means that it’s something made with olive oil, not that it is exclusively olive oil. I suspect that it is a blended oil
• ‘Product of Italy’ : means that it has been in Italy. It usually means that it was packaged in Italy from imported oil
• ‘100% quality’ : means absolutely nothing
• ‘100% natural’ : is used on so many things that it’s effectively meaningless (there have been some lawsuits in the US over this claim, and the courts decided that High Fructose Corn Syrup can be considered ‘natural’ depending on how it’s made)

In the US, there will always be an ingredient list which will show what type of oil (or oils) it actually is, and there is usually some statement about where the olives are grown (Such as ‘packaged in Italy from Italian, Greek, and Tunisian olives’). Unlike the ingredient lists, those statements are not required to be in any particular order, so it’s possible that it is primarily Tunisian olives with enough Italian and Greek ones for them to be able to confuse the issue.

Some other counties also have labeling laws, but China may not be one of them.

Answer 3

Searching for results in Italian about Feroli olive oil or Feroli olio oliva returns 0 results.

Also the Italian flag with the "product of Italy" on the packages seems like a sloppy graphic job.

I am not sure what you mean with legitimate, but at least it doesn't sound like an olive oil made in Italy.

It's probably a marketing strategy to make it sound more appealing to the average customer, like calling any wine Chateau something, to make it sound like a French wine.