It is on a decision by the EU that the Swedish Food Agency has now, in cooperation with municipalities, sent a selection of Swedish olive oils to be tested in an accredited laboratory for two years. There, the oils have undergone chemical, physical and organoleptic (ie smell and taste) analyzes.

All the 21 oils tested in 2018 and 2019 are sold as extra virgin olive oil - the highest standard. But the National Food Agency's analysis shows that 17 of them do not meet the requirements, but should instead be called virgin olive oil. In two cases the standard was even lower - cotton oil.

Cotton oil is called Italian "lampante" because the oil is made from the worst olives and is therefore considered only useful as lamp oil. Such oil must not be sold to consumers without first being purified.

Difficult for the consumer to judge the quality

Olive oil is a notoriously cheated product. In a report in the journal Filter from 2018, an Italian politician is quoted as saying that secret intelligence reports claim that only 16% of the extra virgin oil marketed as Italian actually comes from Italy.

One reason why it is cheated so much with olive oil, both in terms of origin marking and quality, is that it can be very difficult for the consumer to notice that it has been cheated with the product. Moreover, since consumers are prepared to pay extra for the highest quality oil, there is a lot of money to be made from the cheat.

- So what happens is that the consumer can be fooled - you pay for something you don't get, you get something with lower quality, says Aron Lindén at the National Food Agency.

Here you can see the entire result from the Swedish Food Agency's test.