Authors: Sebastian Candiago | Thomas Marsoner | Simon Tscholl | Hélder Fraga
Source: Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems (article, 2025-11-21)
Field: Chemistry — Organic Chemistry

A global database of olive oil geographical indications and their properties The olive tree is an emblematic crop that has shaped mediterranean landscapes since the antiquity (Kabassi et al., 2021). This crop plays a significant role in many rural areas, providing valuable benefits such as olives, olive oil, and essences (Fernández-Habas et al., 2018;Chiappini et al., 2024). More than 90% of worldwide olive cultivations -beyond 10 million hectares (Fraga et al., 2020;Morgado et al., 2022) -are located in the mediterranean basin, with about 50% of them in Greece, Italy and Spain (Scheidel and Krausmann, 2011). Among the benefits provided by olive groves, olive oil has a central value as it has been used since the antiquity as fuel for lightning, pharmaceutical ointment, and for industrial purposes, e.g., as lubricant in machinery (Vossen, 2007). Nowadays, the boom of the so-called Mediterranean diet is boosting consumption of olive oil as a food commodity (Gaforio et al., 2019). Indeed, the use of olive oil as the nearly exclusive dietary fat is what mostly characterizes the Mediterranean area, and it has been proved that olive oil is a healthy food with different uses and multiple benefits for the human body (Bilal et al., 2021). In this socio-economic context, where diet preferences and market changes highly influence the choices of consumers, there is an increasing demand for excellence in agricultural production, such as products certified with labels of origin.Due to the importance of food quality in shaping consumer choices, geographical indications (GI) are increasingly used to protect olive oil products (Karra and Kammoun, 2023). A GI is a sign used on products that have a specific geographical origin and possess qualities or a reputation that are due to that origin (World Intellectual Property Organization, 2013). The concept of GI is often associated with traditional production methods, as well as with more frequent use of local breeds and plant varieties (Belletti et al., 2015). GI play a crucial role in leveraging various socio-economic aspects within rural communities, including local livelihoods and identities, social cohesion, landscape protection and environmental stewardship (Salpina and Pagliacci, 2022). GI are also powerful marketing tools as the products bearing such labels typically attract premium prices (Likudis, 2016). They are protected at various levels of governance by several regulations, including laws against unfair competition, trademark laws, and special laws for the protection of geographical indications or appellations of origin, also known as sui generis GI protection systems (World Intellectual Property Organization, 2013). The extent of legal protection offered to GI varies in accordance to the legal instrument available at the international and/or national levels (International Olive Council, 2010).Due to the link with the local conditions of their production area, GI are increasingly threatened by multiple drivers of change (Tscholl et al., 2022). This is particularly true for those olive oil GI which have the strictest regulations (such as the Protected Designation of Origin in the European Union), not allowing olives cultivated outside the demarcated area to be used for olive oil making. Intensification processes are reshaping mediterranean farmland landscapes with associated impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services (Salazar-Ordóñez et al., 2021;Morgado et al., 2022). Changes in temperature and precipitation will most likely have multiple impacts that could affect the distribution area of the olive grove and its phenological cycle (Fraga et al., 2020;Schneider et al., 2020;Sousa et al., 2020;Silveira et al., 2023). Socio-economic drivers such as the promotion of the Mediterranean diet by the European Union, the Iinternational Oolive Ooil Ccouncil (International Olive Oil Council, 2025) and national food trade promotion organizations is stimulating production and consumption in new areas (Neves and Pires, 2018). There are also cases of new producing territories all over the world, even in areas where climate conditions differ markedly from those of historic cultivation areas (Conde-Innamorato et al., 2019;Sánchez-Martínez and Garrido-Almonacid, 2019). These factors may impact old and new olive oil GI, and enter in conflict with their regulations, quality standards and sustainability (Tscholl et al., 2022). There is therefore the need to gather information about high quality olive oil products to mitigate detrimental effects of global changes by establishing tailored adaptation strategies.While regulatory documents about GIs are usually available from multiple sources, there is a lack of standardized datasets that enable quantitative analyses on GI products. To our knowledge, only a few previous publications created standardized databases of regulatory characteristics of GIs, these mainly focused on specific products such as wine (Candiago et al., 2022(Candiago et al., , 2024)), with only one research that made available geographic information about GI production areas for agri-food products focusing at the regional level (Flinzberger et al., 2022). Regarding the specific field of olive oil, the International Olive Oil Council published an international catalog of olive varieties, including information about their denomination and synonyms, origin and diffusion at the national level, and morphological characteristics (International Olive Oil Council, 2000, 2025). However, to our knowledge, information about the localization of specific varieties at the subnational level, their management practices in specific contexts, and characteristics of the obtained olive oils have never been gathered in a unique data set. Here, focusing specifically on olive oil GI products, we analyzed, standardized and spatialized a set of geographic, agricultural and quality regulations for GI olive oil across the globe using as a reference the local (municipal) level. The present dataset is meant to be used by researchers and practitioners to study GI production areas in the face of increasing impacts of global changes and to identify adaptation strategies to improve their resilience under future conditions while maintaining the typicity of GI products. For example, it allows the calibration of crop models to build scenarios of climate impacts and adaptation, it enables the comparison of regulations between GIs with similar conditions informing decision makers about potential amendments to apply in the respective regions, it allows to identify key production regions, forecast supply and demand, and support decisions regarding trade policies for GI products.Formatted: English (United States)The creation of the global GI olive oil database consisted of various steps including the search for and analysis of GI related documents, the extraction and standardization of relevant information, and the database creation (Figure 1). The process was carried out during the period September 2023 -August 2024; olive oil GI created after this date are therefore not included in the dataset. We focused on production of olive oil GI at the global scale, searching for information on olive oil GI in countries that produce olive oil according to the latest available statistics from FAOSTAT (Supplementary Figure 1), (FAOSTAT, 2024).GI are protected by different regulations that depend on their country, e.g., international treaties or national laws. We therefore had to gather information from different sources. For the purposes of this paper, we include only GIs protected under a dedicated (sui generis) GI system and exclude trademark-based indications (e.g., collective or certification marks). (Sibanda, 2016). We deliberately did this to retain as much as possible the link between the olive oil product and its production territory while focusing on a distinct legal category recognized in national and regional GI regimes, bilateral agreements and proposed or existing multilateral registration systems (Gangjee, 2020).While other olive oil products that are protected by collective trademarks or certification marks might exist, the focus of those products would rather be the production company or method utilized rather than the identification with a particular place of origin (World Intellectual Property Organization, 2025). For this reason, countries like Australia or the United States, even if they produce olive oil, have no entries in our database. Indeed, to our knowledge, olive oil products from these countries do not benefit from sui generis geographical indication schemes for olive oil, and are typically protected under trademark or consumer protection laws (Johnson, 2017;Zito, 2020).We specifically searched for olive oil GI in the countries included in Supplementary Figure 1. As the European Union is the main world producer of olive oil, and it has a well-structured GI quality system, we started by analyzing the EU indications register eAmbrosia which is the reference database to retrieve information for the GI in all the countries of the EU area (Candiago et al., 2022;European Commission -Food, Farming, Fisheries., 2024). The eAmbrosia database included the regulatory documents we needed for the EU countries. In some cases, e.g., when a specific document was missing from eAmbrosia, we extracted the required information from documents on national GI websites (see Supplementary Table 1), (Candiago et al., 2024). To find regulatory information for countries outside Europe, we analyzed two international databases: the worldwide GI compilation from the Organization for an International Geographic Indication Network (Organization for an International Geographic Indication Network, 2024), and the Lisbon Express database from the World Intellectual Property Organization (World Intellectual Property Organization, 2024). These databases were queried to check if any olive oil GI is present in the countries of interest, however, they do not always include up to date regulatory documents. In such cases, we checked whether the country of interest had a specific website for its GI products, or we analyzed the database of its Intellectual property office (see Supplementary Table 2), which often include information about GI protected in a country. If neither of the previously mentioned sources included the necessary information, we contacted national experts asking for specific information on olive oil GI in their respective countries.GI olive oil product specifications are often provided in the language of the country where the product is protected. There are exceptions to this rule, such as with international GI compilations like eAmbrosia (European Commission -Food, Farming, Fisheries., 2024), where most documents are also provided in English. Team members were fluent in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and English (65% of the documents where in one of these languages). In the case of Albanian, Turkish, Slovenian and Croatian (16% of the documents), we relied on the knowledge of native speakers to help us with the translation. In the case of Greek (17% of the documents), sometimes the documents were provided in English as part of the eAmbrosia compilation. In case documents were only in Greek, we used Regulation (EU) No 1308/2013 (European Union, 2013) and the commission implementing regulation (EU) 2019/33 (European Union, 2019a) and 34 (European Union, 2019b), that are translated in all the languages of the EU, to find relevant keywords for searching information in the regulatory documents. This allowed us to easily extract information from the majority of the retrieved documents. To allow a thorough analysis of the remaining documents, we translated them from the original language. For doing this we relied on online translators, e.g., Deepl (Deepl Translate, 2025), and AI platforms, e.g. openAI (ChatGPT version 4.0, 2025), that have showed good reliability in translating from different languages (Takakusagi et al., 2021;Jiao et al., 2023). When documents were available only as image files, we also used optical character recognition to extract the text from the document and translate it.GI product specifications include regulations that depend on the specificity of the product and country of interest. By analyzing the documents retrieved in the previous step, we were able to select and extract a set of regulatory information useful for a spatial, agricultural and quality characterization of world olive oil GI (Candiago et al., 2024). The information, with the exclusion of general information such as the name and country of the GI, focuses on three main categories: i) spatial (e.g., administrative areas where an olive oil GI can be produced), ii) agricultural (e.g., cultivated olive varieties) and iii) quality (e.g., acidity level of an olive oil). The selected regulatory information that we extracted is presented in Table 1.To extract the regulatory information from the legal documents and insert them into our dataset, we copied the relevant entries and pasted them in a dedicated spreadsheet table before proceeding with their standardization, using the Excel software (Microsoft Corporation., 2024). In most of the documents, geospatial information about olive oil GI boundaries was present. GI areas were usually delineated using the municipal boundaries as a reference. We therefore georeferenced olive oil GI using this minimum mapping unit. To do this, we downloaded administrative boundaries for the areas of interest using different sources (Eurogeographic, 2022;Humanitarian Data Exchange, 2025a, 2025b, 2025c, 2025d;OpenAfrica, 2025). We downloaded this data and joined them to the regulatory information by using Geographical Information Systems software (Figure 2). Operations were done using QGIS and ArcGIS software (QGIS Development Team, 2022;Environmental Systems Research Institute, 2024). Table 2 summarizes some of the information gathered from the analysis of GI documents.We present an easily accessible and freely available dataset about selected world olive oil GI regulations, including geospatial information that can be used to support researchers and decision makers in the field of olive growing. The data is freely available through the Figshare data publisher (Candiago et al., 2025).The dataset comprises a geospatial file with the boundaries of analyzed olive oil GI and a .csv file with the regulatory information extracted from the regulatory documents. The files included are:1. World_OliveOil_GI.gpkg: a geospatial file that includes the boundaries of the 177 olive oil GIs. 2. World_OliveOil_GI.csv: a table that includes the regulatory information outlined in Table 1.The geospatial dataset included in the world olive oil GI dataset is formatted as standard .gpkg file, which can be read in various coding languages (e.g., R, Python) and software applications (ArcGIS, QGIS). The join between the spatial features included in our dataset and the regulatory information included as a .csv file is guaranteed by the common field "Feature ID". The .csv file is saved using utf-8 encoding.We spatialized and gathered regulatory information about world olive oil GI based on official national and international regulations. By using the Corine Land Cover (European Environment Agency, 2025), we checked how much of the Olive Groves identified in this file were included in the spatialized GI areas in Europe and Turkey. More than 76% of the olive groves falls within our spatialized GI area. For each GI, we provide the reference to the official documents from which the data was created, allowing the user to cross check pieces of information with ease. 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