Every price on an olive oil board hangs on one word: the grade. Two tanks of oil from the same mill, pressed in the same week, can differ in value by twenty percent because one passed a laboratory and sensory test and the other did not. For anyone buying, selling or simply trying to read this market, the grading system is not background knowledge. It is the price structure itself.

This guide covers what each grade legally means, how oil ends up in one grade rather than another, and how the spreads between grades work as market signals. Current prices for each grade are on our live boards: extra virgin, virgin and lampante.

Who defines the grades

Olive oil grades are not marketing terms. They have legal definitions set by two overlapping frameworks: the International Olive Council (IOC) trade standard, which most producing countries follow, and the European Union's marketing standards, which govern the world's largest producing and consuming bloc. The two are closely aligned on the essentials.

A grade is assigned on two kinds of evidence. Chemistry: free acidity (expressed as oleic acid), peroxide value, UV absorbency and a battery of purity tests. And sensory assessment: a trained tasting panel scores the oil for defects (fustiness, mustiness, rancidity and others) and for positive attributes (fruitiness, bitterness, pungency). An oil must clear both bars for its grade. Excellent chemistry with a sensory defect still means a downgrade.

Extra virgin olive oil (EVOO)

Extra virgin is the top commercial grade, and the thresholds are strict on paper: free acidity no higher than 0.8%, no sensory defects at all (the panel's median defect must be zero), and detectable fruitiness. The oil must be obtained from the fruit solely by mechanical means, at temperatures that do not degrade it, with no chemical treatment of any kind.

In practice, good extra virgin sits far inside those limits. Well-made oil from sound fruit routinely shows acidity below 0.3%. The 0.8% ceiling is a legal boundary, not a description of quality oil; by the time acidity approaches it, something has usually gone wrong in the grove or the mill.

What decides whether oil makes the grade is mostly decided before extraction. Healthy fruit, picked at the right moment and milled within hours, produces extra virgin almost by default. Fruit damaged by the olive fly, dropped to the ground, or left waiting at the mill ferments and oxidises, and its acidity climbs past the threshold before the oil ever reaches a tank. This is why a campaign's weather and pest pressure show up directly in how much of the harvest grades as extra virgin, and why that share moves prices. Our production data tracks the volumes each campaign delivers.

Commercially, extra virgin is the reference grade. Spain's EVOO print at origin is the benchmark the world trades around, and the premiums for Italian or Greek extra virgin are quoted against it. The Spanish price board carries all three Spanish grades side by side.

Virgin olive oil

Virgin olive oil is made exactly the same way as extra virgin, mechanically and without chemistry. The difference is tolerance: free acidity may reach 2.0%, and the tasting panel may find slight defects (a median defect up to 3.5 on the scale) provided fruitiness is still present.

Virgin is the grade of near misses: oil from fruit that was slightly overripe, slightly delayed at the mill, or a touch past its best. None of that makes it unfit; it makes it ordinary. Bottlers use virgin oil in blends, some Mediterranean markets consume it directly as an everyday cooking oil, and refiners buy it when its price converges with lampante.

For market readers, virgin's importance is less about the oil and more about the signal. The discount at which virgin trades to extra virgin widens when the harvest was sound (plenty of extra virgin around, ordinary oil has to discount to move) and narrows when quality is scarce. It is one of the cleanest single indicators of a campaign's quality profile, and it updates weekly on the virgin price page.

Lampante olive oil

Lampante takes its name from the Italian for lamp oil, which is what it was once used for. It is virgin-method oil that failed the test: acidity above 2.0%, or serious sensory defects, or both. It cannot legally be sold for consumption as it is.

Every litre of lampante is sold to a refinery. That single fact anchors the entire olive oil price structure from below. Refiners neutralise the acidity, deodorise and bleach the oil, and what comes out is refined olive oil. The economics of that process, plus the value of the refined product, set a floor under what refiners will pay for lampante, and every other grade prices upward from there.

Lampante supply is the mirror image of extra virgin supply. A campaign hit by drought stress, fly damage or harvest delays produces a big lampante pool; a clean campaign produces a small one. Traders watch lampante availability as a supply signal in its own right. The current print is on the lampante price page.

Refined olive oil and the "olive oil" category

Refined olive oil is lampante after treatment: neutral in taste, nearly colourless, chemically unobjectionable, with acidity brought down to 0.3% or less. It is not sold to consumers on its own. Instead it is blended with a proportion of virgin or extra virgin oil to restore some character, and that blend is sold under the label "olive oil" (in some markets, "pure olive oil" or "classic"). The blend must keep acidity at 1.0% or below.

This is the category that confuses retail buyers most. A supermarket bottle labelled simply "olive oil" is mostly refined lampante with a share of virgin-grade oil for flavour. It is a legitimate, regulated product, but it is a different product from extra virgin, and the bulk economics behind it start at the lampante print, not the EVOO one.

Olive pomace oil

After mechanical extraction, the leftover paste of skins, pulp and pits still holds residual oil. Solvent extraction recovers it; refining makes it edible; a blend with virgin oil makes it saleable as olive pomace oil. It is the cheapest member of the family, used mainly in food service and food manufacturing. It sits outside the virgin price structure but tends to track it at a distance, since its supply also depends on how much fruit was milled.

How the grades set the price structure

Think of the grades as floors stacked on one another. Refined-oil economics set the lampante floor. Virgin trades above lampante because it can skip the refinery. Extra virgin trades above virgin because supply is capped by nature: only sound fruit, handled fast, makes the grade.

The gaps between the floors are the market's quality report. In a campaign flush with good oil, the EVOO premium over lampante shrinks as a share of the price, because quality is not scarce. In a difficult campaign the premium blows out.

The numbers make it concrete. In early August 2026 the Spanish board quoted extra virgin at €3.54 per kilo, virgin at €3.21 and lampante at €2.97: a 57 cent gap from top to bottom, among the narrower readings of recent campaigns, consistent with a market well supplied with sound oil. During the supply crisis of 2023 and 2024, by contrast, the same spread at times widened dramatically as usable extra virgin became genuinely scarce. Live differentials, history and percentile context are on the spreads page.

Two practical rules follow. First, never read a headline "olive oil price" without asking which grade it refers to; the difference is not rounding error. Second, watch the spreads as much as the levels. Price levels tell you about supply and demand overall; the grade spreads tell you what kind of oil the campaign actually produced.

What grades do not tell you

Grades measure conformity, not excellence. Two extra virgins can differ enormously in style, intensity and polyphenol content while sharing a certificate. Award-winning single-estate oils and correct but unremarkable bulk EVOO carry the same legal designation. Premium segments (protected designations of origin, early-harvest oils, high-polyphenol oils) price far above the commodity prints quoted on our boards, and their market follows quality dynamics the grading system does not capture.

Grades are also only as reliable as their enforcement. Mislabelling, particularly oil sold as extra virgin that would not pass a panel, remains the industry's most persistent integrity problem. We cover how testing, enforcement and fraud cases work in Olive Oil Fraud and Adulteration: What Buyers Need to Know.

The grades at a glance

• Extra virgin: acidity up to 0.8%, zero sensory defects, fruitiness present. Sold direct; the top of the market.
• Virgin: acidity up to 2.0%, slight defects allowed. Blends, and direct sale in some markets.
• Lampante: above 2.0% acidity or defective. Fails the panel; must be refined.
• Refined: acidity brought to 0.3% or less; neutral by design. Never sold alone.
• Olive oil (blend): refined plus a virgin share for character; acidity up to 1.0%. Retail and food service.
• Olive pomace oil: solvent-extracted from the paste, refined and blended. Food service and manufacturing.

Limits per the EU marketing standard and IOC trade standard. The full sourcing behind our price boards is on the methodology page.