why is cheap olive oil and honey usually sourced from different countries?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.