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A survey was launched to understand the current problems and sensitivities of the olive oil market through a series of questions clustered around topics related to quality, traceability, regulation, standard methods and other issues. The questions were selected after a series of interviews with different actors to identify those aspects where some disagreement or different points of view may exist. These questions were grouped in topics such as geographical traceability, consumer perception and quality management. The survey was addressed to eight different olive oil actors independently: producers, retailers, importers, exporters, analysts, workers at regulatory bodies, and consumers. Approximately half of the respondents (67.0% for consumers and 56.0% for the rest of olive oil actors) claimed to understand the importance of the protected designation of origin. In fact, the traceability objectives that were selected as the most relevant were those related with geographical traceability (19.3%) followed by the detection of adulteration (15.6%). Most of the respondents (80%) would agree to share data for a common database; however, some concerns exist about the use of these data and the issue of paying to have access to this database. The respondents mostly expressed an affirmative answer concerning the efficiency of panel test (74%) and a negative answer (90%) concerning the proposal of removing from regulation, although 42% agree with their revision for improvement. The opinions on “best before” date and their relationship with quality and the willingness to apply non-targeted methods were also surveyed.

The control of virgin olive oil (VOO) freshness requires new tools that reflect the diverse chemical changes that take place during the market period. Fluorescence spectroscopy is one of the techniques that has been suggested for controlling virgin olive oil (VOO) freshness during its shelf-life. However, a complete interpretation of fluorescence spectra requires analyzing multiple parameters (chemical, physical–chemical, and sensory) to evaluate the pace of fluorescence spectral changes under moderate conditions with respect to other changes impacting on VOO quality. In this work, four VOOs were analyzed every month with excitation–emission fluorescence spectra. The same samples were characterized with the concentration of fluorophores (phenols, tocopherols, chlorophyll pigments), physical–chemical parameters (peroxide value, K232, K270, free acidity), and sensory attributes (medians of defects and of the fruity attribute). From the six components extracted with parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC), two components were assigned to chlorophyll pigments and those assigned to tocopherols, phenols, and oxidation products were selected for their ability to discriminate between fresh and aged oils. Thus, the component assigned to oxidation products correlated with K270 in the range 0.80–0.93, while the component assigned to tocopherols–phenols correlated with the fruity attribute in the range 0.52–0.90. The sensory analysis of the samples revealed that the changes of these PARAFAC components occurred at the same time as, or even before, the changes of the sensory characteristics.