Lampante keeps finding buyers near 3€/kg, while the EVOO premium is close to its tightest level in a year. Something has to give.

OliveTerm Insight, August 3, 2026. Prices are OliveTerm origin index values as of July 31, weighted from government reporting, cooperative disclosures and sector press.

Spanish lampante closed July at 2.99€/kg and has now spent six consecutive weeks moving sideways between roughly 2.95€ and 3.05€. After falling steadily from 3.73€ in mid-January, the lowest grade on the board has, at least for now, stopped falling.

That does not make 3€ a hard floor. Nothing prevents lampante from trading below it if supply pressure becomes strong enough. But the longer the market keeps finding buyers around this level, the more relevant it becomes as a support zone.

Part of that support comes from refining. Lampante still needs to be refined before it reaches the consumer, so lower raw material prices naturally improve the economics for refiners and industrial buyers. After months of bidding cautiously into a falling market, prices around 3€ give them more reason to step back in and rebuild coverage.

There is also another limit further down the chain. Refined olive oil ultimately competes with sunflower and other seed oils in the lower-priced end of the market. The wider that gap becomes, the harder it is for olive oil to defend volume. That competition does not set a precise floor for lampante, but it helps shape how much value refiners can extract from it.

The more interesting development, however, is happening above lampante.

A premium cut nearly in half

Spanish EVOO closed July at 3.56€/kg, leaving a premium of just 0.57€ over lampante. In late March, that spread peaked at 1.04€.

In other words, the gap has nearly halved in four months.

Most of that compression has come from EVOO. Since late June, extra virgin has lost around 0.25€/kg while lampante has barely moved. On July 20, the spread briefly touched 0.43€, its narrowest level of the past twelve months.

OliveTerm's weekly series puts the current move into perspective:

• Current spread: 0.57€/kg
• 90-day average: 0.68€/kg
• 12-month average: 0.74€/kg
• 12-month range: 0.43€-1.32€/kg
• Full-history range: 0.10€-1.77€/kg

A 0.57€ premium is not exceptional over the full history of the market. The long-run average sits around 0.51€. But that figure is heavily influenced by the low-price years of 2018 to 2020, when the whole market traded much lower. Against the last twelve months, today's spread is clearly compressed.

And even the headline 0.57€ probably overstates the real economic gap.

Lampante still has to be refined before it can enter the market as refined olive oil. That means additional processing, losses and logistics. So the real difference between lampante-based refined material and EVOO is smaller than the raw origin-price spread suggests.

That is where the current market starts to get interesting.

An imperfect substitution, but a real one

Lampante and EVOO are not direct substitutes in every channel.

Refiners buy lampante for the refined olive oil category and for industrial use. EVOO serves a different market and carries a different quality proposition. A narrow spread does not suddenly make every lampante buyer switch to extra virgin.

But substitution does not need to happen everywhere to matter.

At the margin, packers can use more virgin or extra virgin in blends when the premium becomes cheap enough. Food service and industrial buyers with some flexibility can trade up.

That is why the narrowing spread matters.

If lampante continues to find support around 3€ while EVOO keeps drifting lower, the gap eventually becomes difficult to maintain. Either extra virgin starts attracting enough demand to stabilise, or lampante has to fall further to restore a discount large enough to justify refining.

In that sense, a firm 3€ lampante market can indirectly become supportive for EVOO.

The shelf makes the decision simple

For the consumer, none of this stays abstract for long. Refined olive oil on the shelf is, in essence, lampante plus refining, blending, packaging and margin. Extra virgin carries its own costs, but its raw material has become dramatically cheaper this year. As origin prices converge, the retail gap between a bottle of refined olive oil and a bottle of EVOO narrows too — with a lag, but reliably.

And when that gap gets small enough, the choice in the aisle becomes very easy. Faced with two bottles a few cents apart, most shoppers will simply take the extra virgin. Being cheaper is refined olive oil's entire proposition; it has no other argument on the shelf. A refined category that is no longer meaningfully cheaper than EVOO is a category at risk of losing volume.

That is the demand-side version of the same squeeze. If consumers trade up, packers need less refined material, which ultimately means less lampante demand at current prices — while demand for extra virgin firms. Both effects push in the same direction: they support EVOO and weaken the case for paying 3€ for lampante.

What could break 3€

There are still clear reasons why lampante could fall further.

A large 2026/27 Spanish crop, comfortable carry-in stocks, aggressive selling ahead of the new harvest or refiners arriving in October already well covered could all push lampante below 3€. Additional supply from other Mediterranean origins would add further pressure.

For now, though, competing origins are not offering much of a discount. Tunisian extra virgin, for example, is currently trading above Spanish levels.

So 3€ should not be treated as an untouchable floor. It is better understood as a zone where buyers have so far been willing to step in.

And over the next few weeks, the more important signal may not be the absolute lampante price at all.

It may be the spread.

It has already narrowed from 1.04€ to 0.57€ since March, against a one-year average of 0.74€. If it keeps moving back towards the 0.43€ low, the current structure becomes harder to sustain.

Either EVOO stabilises, or lampante breaks lower.