THE battle to shift the health perception of olive oil is ongoing according to the CEO of the Australian Olive Association Lisa Rowntree.
In delivering her report at the National Olive Industry Conference in Mildura, Victoria last month, Ms Rowntree gave an update on the continued push to have olive oil considered a healthy fat.
While the Australian Olive Association (AOA) has held several positive meetings with politicians and dieticians over the past year, Ms Rowntree took particular aim at the Federal Government's Health Star Rating system, launched in 2014.
The Health Star Rating is a front-of-pack labelling system that rates the overall nutritional profile of packaged food and assigns it a rating from ½ a star to 5 stars.
Part of the system is based on "risk nutrients"- saturated fat, sodium (salt) and sugars.
Because olive oil is considered a fat, it doesn't appear as healthy as the industry would like.
On par with heavily processed margarine at 3.5, extra virgin olive oil scored half a star worse than canola oil, a much cheaper and highly refined alternative.
Ms Rowntree said the AOA had had a number of meetings with the authors of the Health Star Rating as well as numerous letters of correspondence but the message was yet to get through.
"They understand our issue but they are not entirely sure they want to do anything about it," Ms Rowntree said.
Further frustration lies in the fact that a product's Health Star rating is only meant to be compared to products within the same category (ie. breakfast cereals compared to other breakfast cereals).
"Their messaging that they are sending out, for instance, 'the more stars the healthier the choice', confuses their own message because they are not telling you to look in the same category. They are telling you in general, the more stars the healthier," Ms Rowntree said.
"And when you've got Jaffas doing better than little cubes of cheese for kids, or a packet of potato chips doing better than apples, you are clearly sending the wrong message to consumers."
The other labelling issue that continues to be a battle for extra virgin olive oil producers is that of shonky imported products.
Ms Rowntree showed an example of a product featuring olives on the label and the words "Tuscan blend" suggesting it is extra virgin olive oil, when the fine print on the back actually reveals it is 93pc canola oil.
She said the industry as a whole was keen to promote its positive health aspects along with the economic contributions that olive and olive oil production has to the Australian economy.
"We are pushing this strong message going forward that we are a good industry and we are worth looking after and we are worth taking notice of," Ms Rowntree said.