Spain's olive oil market has shifted into its end-of-campaign gear. AICA's provisional data for July put offtake at 95,104 tonnes (excluding imports), the third consecutive month in the 94,000–95,000 tonne range, and well below the roughly 119,000 tonnes per month the market averaged between October and June.
Ninety percent of the harvest is already sold
The slowdown is not a demand collapse; it is arithmetic. With production for 2025/26 closed at 1,298,503 tonnes and cumulative offtake now around 1.16 million tonnes, almost 90% of the campaign's oil has already left the mills. What remains to be sold is, increasingly, oil that holders were never in a hurry to sell.
Stocks at the end of July stood at roughly 568,700 tonnes: about 330,000 tonnes still at mills, 235,000 tonnes at packers, and a residual 4,000 tonnes with the Patrimonio Comunal Olivarero. That is a drawdown of around 120,000 tonnes in a single month: offtake plus exports and packing activity are still eating into inventory faster than the headline sales figure alone suggests.
A comfortable link into a big new crop
With August traditionally the quietest month of the year and only two months left in the campaign, the sector's estimate of a carryover above 300,000 tonnes into 2026/27 looks solid. That is a comfortable (not heavy) link by historical standards, but it lands just as expectations build for a large new Spanish crop.
This combination explains the tension in the market right now. Producer organisations read the same data differently: UPA calls the campaign's commercialisation pace "extraordinary" while warning that prices near the €3.43/kg floor do not reach production costs, and COAG in Jaén accuses parts of the chain of using the big-harvest narrative to push prices down further. Asaja, for its part, attributes some of the summer demand weakness to reputational damage from the trade dispute with the United States.
What it means for buyers and sellers
For buyers, the window of maximum leverage may be shorter than it looks. A 300,000-tonne link is not enough to weigh on the market for long if the new crop disappoints on final yields, and no fresh oil arrives in volume before November. For sellers, July's number is a reminder that waiting has a cost: the market is absorbing barely 95,000 tonnes a month, and everyone still holding oil is competing for the same slow summer demand.
The next AICA report, covering August, will effectively close the book on 2025/26. From here, the market's attention moves to the groves: rain, fruit set and the first yield estimates for what could be Spain's second consecutive campaign above 1.3 million tonnes.