Price methodology

What the origin prices are

Origin prices are wholesale bulk prices at origin, quoted in EUR per kilogram: what a mill or cooperative is paid for oil in bulk, before bottling, branding or transport. They are not retail shelf prices; retail prices on OliveTerm are shown separately, per litre, from supermarket data. The date next to each quote is the reference date of the latest print, not the moment you loaded the page.

Where each series comes from

The backbone is the weekly official price reporting that EU producer countries are required to make under Implementing Regulation (EU) 2017/1185, republished as open data by the European Commission's Agri-food Data Portal. OliveTerm fetches these prints automatically every day and quotes, per symbol, the reference market for that origin:

• Spain (EVOO, Virgin, Lampante) - the Jaén (ES616) market, the reference market for Spanish origin prices.
• Italy, Portugal & Greece (EVOO) - the national average price, because their regional markets report too thinly for one market to carry a continuous series.
• Tunisia (EVOO) - not covered by EU reporting; quoted from ONH and trade sources when available, and carried as a declared OliveTerm estimate between prints.

When a fresher same-week update is available from a higher-frequency national source (for Spain, the Poolred origin market), it can carry the board between weekly prints; the source line under the board always names what the current number is.

Prints vs estimates

An official print is a number published by a government or official body, ingested unchanged. An OliveTerm estimate is our own figure for a series with no fresh print, held at, or moved with, the closest observed benchmark, and it is labelled as such in the data itself. The “Change” column measures the move since the previous update of that series (for weekly series, week on week). It is deliberately not labelled “24h”: origin prices do not reprice daily, and we will not imply a cadence the market does not have.

The board right now

Live provenance for every quoted symbol, read from the same table the board renders.

Revisions and history

Official sources revise. The ingest re-reads an eight-week window every day, so a revised print replaces our stored copy within a day of publication, and every print we have ever ingested is retained in a permanent observations record, so the published series can always be traced back to what the source said and when we saw it. Where the long-run history predates this pipeline, points carried over from earlier sources are being progressively re-anchored to the official weekly series.

Retail prices follow a separate method, supermarket shelf prices per litre of extra virgin, per country, described on the retail prices page.