Agronomic and Technological Factors Affecting Tunisian Olive Oil Quality

• Published in: Agricultural sciences Vol. 6; no. 5; pp. 513 - 526
• Main Authors: Gharbi, Ines, Issaoui, Manel, Mehri, Sounira, Cheraief, Imed, Sifi, Samira, Hammami, Mohammed
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.05.2015
• ISSN: 2156-8553; 2156-8561
• DOI: 10.4236/as.2015.65051

Olive oil is a very versatile product. It has distinctive virtues in the fields of health and nutrition. For this reason, olive oil quality has attracted attention and become the focus of many studies. Olive oil quality depends on several factors such as ripening, extraction method, soil type, climatic conditions, harvesting time, varieties and storage conditions. Quality assessment of olive oil is linked to an important series of physicochemical parameters including free fatty acid content, peroxide value and sensory evaluation. The main objective of this study wass to investigate using statistical analysis, the main factors influencing the quality of Tunisian olive oils. This study demonstrates that the main factors influencing Tunisian olive oil quality are: olive ripening, harvesting methods, olive pre-processing storage, olive washing, leaf removing, mixing, separation systems and crushing time. The data also shows that the commercial qualitative parameters of virgin olive oil such as free fatty acids, peroxide value, specific spectrophotometric absorptions in the UV region and sensorial assessment depend on the cultivar and quality of olives before processing.