I can’t imagine sourcing from a variety of countries is cheaper than coming from one source. I also can’t imagine it’s a blended scotch situation. Here’s an example https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/707766368363216918/1288581748552110260/image0.jpg?ex=66f5b4c5&is=66f46345&hm=67504fd0cf1f4f340df2d8a68eb026e9cf55bfb9d2cd13280c92dabc7a126f0f&
In: Economics
Often it’s for 1 of 2 reasons:
Different parts of the product come from each of those countries.
OR
They use sources from each of those countries interchangeably and don’t want to print new labels each time they get a new shipment from a different country.
Russian bees produce more honey. They are also more aggressive little bitches compared to their African counter parts.
Honey bees are not native to the US.
All I know as a beekeepers kid.
Also they buy in bulk for both and dump it all into the same bottleing machine. So it has to be labeled as such.
Often it’s so they don’t have to reprint labels. They’ll source from wherever is cheapest at any given time, which will vary based on harvest times, climate/weather conditions, economic conditions, etc. They would have to frequently change the labels each time they changed the source so it’s easier/cheaper to list all their potential sources.
There is a lot of fraud in honey and olive oil. The cheaper it is, generally the more likely it has been mixed with something else (that is not olive oil or honey)
They’re buying from different parts of the world because different regions harvest crops at different times of the year. Argentina for example is in the southern hemisphere, so their seasons are flipped and they will be harvesting their summer crops when Northern hemisphere regions like Italy or Greece are in the middle of winter. It won’t be a fixed recipe at any point of the year and the proportion of oil originating from one region to another will change depending on where they can find the cheapest olives.
The thing is. Sourcing from different countries IS cheaper than coming from one source.
Transporting bulk goods (like olives and honey) by boat is dirt cheap. Like, a few dollars per ton to transport it from one side of the world to the other.
So what matters is mostly how much material&labour was involved in producing the goods and how far that good was from a railway station (the cheapest mode of land transportation per ton of freight) or port (the cheapest transport overall).
Usually the cost of production well exceeds the cost of transportation, and as such your food might have made several trips around the world in search of the cheapest means of collecting that goods and the cheapest labour to refine that goods. So for example fish filées might be fished outside the coast of Norway, then frozen, sent to china to be filéed and packaged, then frozen again and sent back to Norway to be sold.
Now. Lets get down to the specifics for Olives and honey. For honey it IS a blended scotch situation. Honey tastes different depending on what flowers the bees fed on and the season. So commercial honey is almost always blended before being packaged to maintain a uniform taste profile. Also, buying the cheapest honey is a big motivator, but blending is an important reason.
For olives it’s mostly about growing seasons, what the local weather patterns are etc. They buy whatever is cheapest in this or that season and depending on how the weather was that year (and they don’t bother swapping the label, because that costs money). For example Argentina is not a big olive producer, and their yields are lower than those of big olive countries like Spain, Greece, Turkey and Morocco. But since they’re on the southern hemisphere their harvest season is offset from the Mediterranean season, so they’ve been making money selling olives that keep the packaging machines going through out off-season.
In a lot of industries, the rule is “use the designation for the largest possible area you’re using.”
In this case, I wouldn’t assume that they’re taking in honey or olive oil from lots of places and mixing them into a big batch. What’s probably happening is that they have a dozen suppliers from a 5 different countries, and they don’t want to bottle and label each one separately. They get a batch of olive oil in from Spain, it gets bottled and sent out. They have a batch from Italy, it goes in those same bottles and gets sent out. Saves them the effort of switching over machinery and getting certification for different labels, and they market their product as a more generic, cheaper option as a result.
why is it hard to believe that buying from multiple sources is cheaper than 1 source? If a good is limited in supply in country A, I need to also source from country B.
Sure, country A is cheaper, and if they could fulfill my entire demand that would be great, but maybe they can’t. They’d raise their prices because that’s how supply and demand works.
So, the average of country A’s lower price and Country B’s prices is lower than buying it all from Country A.
In fact, the competition could incentivize both of them to essentially work in my favor, whereas neither has any incentive if there’s an exclusive deal between myself and them.
Not the exact same concept, but I managed supply chain costs for labor providers. It never was cheaper to only have 1 supplier. for similar reasons, 1 supplier usually can’t meet all of your demands and because it creates natural competition amongst everyone you buy from when they are pitted against one another for your business.
You would see some short term cost advantages to going with a single source, but without fail……all of the more expensive suppliers magically found a way to cost less when they weren’t getting any of your business.
As far as olive oil goes, they source and blend from many different places because it is both cheaper, and creates a more consistent product that doesn’t change much when different harvests and batches change
Of course it’s cheaper. For example for honey, how much of it is actually honey and how much is just sugar syrup?
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