**1. Introduction**

264 Olive Germplasm – The Olive Cultivation, Table Olive and Olive Oil Industry in Italy

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The market for imported, premium priced foods has increased dramatically over recent years, as consumers become ever more aware of products originating from around the world. There are many food products that are of superior quality (taste, texture, fragrance etc.) because of the locale in which they are cultivated. Environmental conditions, such as local climate and soil characteristics, combine to yield crops that exhibit specific traits. Clearly, higher quality products demands higher market prices, therefore unscrupulous traders may attempt to increase profits by deliberately mislabelling foods, or by increasing the volume of a good quality batch through adulteration with sub-standard produce.

In recent years, there has been increasing legislation to protect the rights of both the consumer and honest producers. On 2009 the European Union (EU) Member States agreed to require origin labelling for virgin and extra virgin olive oils (EC Regulation 182/2009) to defend consumers need about true characteristics and origin. To enforce these laws, a measure of the authenticity of samples must be made, most often in the form of proving the presence/absence of adulterants, or verifying geographical or cultivar origin by comparison with known and reliable samples.

The term traceability is often used in modern language, however its usage is applied for different meanings. In fact, in certain cases it is used to describe the origins of the raw materials, whilst in others to describe from which geographical region a foodstuff originates. It is also used more generically to identify a particular producer or from where it has been purchased. Many consider it as a guarantee of food safety and therefore obligatory for all food products; others however as a guarantee of quality and therefore a voluntary value.

Also the applied legislation is highly complex, with lawmakers giving different functions to traceability depending on the application and environment of the law. With the event of the food crisis in the 90's it was evident that new guidelines were urgently required to simplify and streamline the processes which could also be applied to food contamination. For this reason, the new laws of the European Union were considered as an umbrella and termed

© 2012 Perri et al., licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2012 Perri et al., licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

"General Laws for food safety" and was not applied only to food safety but also: to introduce the concept of traceability where food companies (producers, manufacturers and importers) need to guarantee to be able to demonstrate the traceability of every food, animal feed and ingredient, showing the chain from producer to consumer; create the " European Food Safety Authority" (EFSA) to unify the various commities and to make public the scientific process and risks; to strenghthen the ealry warning system adopted by European governments and the European Commission to enable rapid interventions in cases of food safety in the human and animal food chains.

Olive Oil Traceability 267

Moreover, the amount of information that identifies a batch may vary and of course the complexity of the whole system increases with what information the company chooses to

Internal traceability, then, helps to express the internal procedures of each company to trace

The label is the instrument through which information is transferred to consumers. It's easy

Finally, the information given in the production lot should be able to trace all the links along the chain, back to the first producer and/or supplier of the product or substance to whom it belongs. Traceability chain is an inter-company process, resulting from internal processes of every operator in the industry. These systems should be linked by efficient information systems. It is not governed by a single person in the chain, the relations between the

The increase in the demand for high-quality *olive oil*s has led to the appearance in the market of *olive oil*s elaborated with specific characteristics. They include oils of certain regions possessing well-known characteristics, that is, *olive oil*s with a denomination of origin, or with specific olive variety composition, that is, coupage or monovarietal *olive oil*s. Monovarietal *olive oil*s have certain specific characteristics related to the olive variety from which they are elaborated (Montealegre *et al*., 2010). However, coupage *olive oil*s are

The appearance of denominations and protected indications of origin has promoted the existence of oils labeled according to these criteria. Regulation 2081/92, to promote and

An *olive oil* with a PDO denomination requires meeting precise definition of several parameters such as cultivar, geographical origin, agronomic practice, production technology, and organoleptic qualities (Giménez *et al*., 2010), and all of these parameters have to be investigated to study its traceability and to certify its quality. The introduction of certifications of origin and quality for virgin *olive oil* as PDO makes necessary the

Any research dealing with *olive oil* traceability is focused on investigating the botanical or geographical origin. In both cases, the selection of the markers (compounds with discriminating power) to be studied is complicated because the composition of extra virgin *olive oil*s is the result of complex interactions among olive variety, environmental conditions, fruit ripening, and oil extraction technology (Araghipour *et al*., 2006). The verification of the

**3. Analytical methods for the traceability of extra virgin olive oil** 

obtained from several olive varieties to achieve a special flavor or aroma.

protect food products, created the systems known as:

 Protected Designation of Origin (PDO); Protected Geographical Indication (PGI); ''Traditional Speciality Guaranteed" (TSG).

implementation of traceability procedures.

include in the identification of a lot.

operators allow the tracing of the chain.

to understand why this essential requirement is effective.

the origin of materials used.

In this chapter, we will only consider the "traceability" as a process that allows us to track "from downstream to upstream" the informations distributed along the olive-oil production chain, from producer to consumer (from farm to fork), and to include a evaluation of analytical methods useful in ascertaining what is claimed on the label, in according to the Regulation (CE) 178/2002.
