Olive oil launches its biggest-ever campaign — €22m to conquer the American kitchen, with the World Cup as the springboard

The Hispano-Luso Report

First a World Cup. Then a Massachusetts insurer. Now Spain wants the American kitchen.

On Tuesday, at the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, the Spanish olive oil sector presented ‘All in a Drop’ — its biggest-ever US campaign: a three-year, €22 million promotional offensive aimed at the United States, the largest campaign the sector has funded in its history. The timing was not subtle, and nobody pretended otherwise. “There could be no better moment,” said Teresa Pérez, head of the Interprofesional del Aceite de Oliva Español, the industry body behind the push, “than when in Manhattan, in the United States, nobody is talking about anything but Spain.”

The Havas-produced campaign film even includes footage of the World Cup final — the one Spain won on American soil, against, as it happens, Argentina, whose flag carrier featured in yesterday’s edition. A “happy coincidence,” the campaign’s makers called it, of the kind €22 million budgets are built to exploit.

The prize

The commercial logic is straightforward and enormous. The United States is on the verge of becoming the world’s largest consumer of olive oil, overtaking Spain and Italy themselves, with annual consumption already past 400,000 tonnes. It is Spain’s second-largest export client, a market where Spanish producers have sold as much as €1 billion in a single year. Set the €22 million against that: the sector is spending roughly two per cent of a good year’s American sales to defend — and grow — the other ninety-eight. Whoever owns the American palate as it converts to olive oil owns the industry’s next decade — and the campaign, which launches on the streets of New York before expanding to Miami, Los Angeles and beyond, is Spain’s bid for that ownership.

The creative bet is cultural rather than technical: the spot is built around the sobremesa — the untranslatable Spanish institution of lingering at the table after the meal — with extra virgin olive oil cast as the protagonist of a way of eating, not merely an ingredient. Chef and author Andy Baraghani signs on as campaign ambassador, fronting culinary experiences for the American food commentariat. It is soft power by tasting menu.

The fight underneath

Read past the launch-event gloss, though, and this is a counter-offensive, not a victory lap. Spain supplies around 32% of American olive oil imports — the market leader — but Spanish sales into the US have fallen more than 21% year on year. Pérez was unusually frank about the reason: price. Spanish oil has been selling at an average of $5.37 per kilo against $4.01 for Tunisian competition, and in a tariff-shadowed market where every imported bottle carries an extra burden, the gap shows up on the shelf. Cheaper origins are eating into Spanish share at precisely the moment the American market is becoming the biggest prize in the industry.

Hence the strategy underneath the strategy: if Spain cannot win the price war, it must refuse to fight one. “All in a Drop” is an attempt to move the contest from the price tag to the label — to make “Spanish” mean something in an American supermarket the way “Italian” long has, justifying the premium rather than apologising for it. Javier Sierra, agriculture counsellor at the Spanish embassy in Washington, put the diagnosis plainly: there is a gap in America between the commercial leadership Spanish companies already hold and the image of Spain, which consumers have not yet fully constructed.

Spain, in other words, has spent decades as the anonymous supplier inside other countries’ brands — much of the “Italian” olive oil in American pantries began in Andalusian groves. The living proof sits in the sector’s own boardrooms: Deoleo, the Córdoba-based group that is the world’s largest olive oil company, conquered American shelves through the Italian-badged brands it owns — Bertolli and Carapelli among them — while its Spanish flagship, Carbonell, remains a stranger to US consumers. Spain won the market by hiding its nationality. The campaign is the attempt to stop selling the commodity and start selling the country.

The pattern

Regular readers will recognise the shape of the fortnight. Mapfre wrote a $1.5 billion cheque for Massachusetts on Thursday. Bank of America spent July telling the Spanish press that Spanish champions would begin deploying capital abroad at scale. And now the olive oil sector — 350,000 farming families and the world’s dominant producer — commits its largest-ever budget to the same destination. Three very different vehicles, one direction of travel: Spain is spending money in America, on American terms, in English.

Whether €22 million can rebrand a commodity is a fair question — Italy’s image lead was built over a century of emigration and restaurant menus, not three years of taxi adverts. But the structural tide helps: American consumption is growing, the health halo around extra virgin olive oil keeps strengthening, and the supplier with a third of the market has more shelf presence to build on than any challenger. The campaign does not need to make Americans buy olive oil. Americans are doing that themselves. It needs only to make them notice whose oil it already is.

The scoreboard

A trophy in the stadium, a trophy on the Nasdaq, and now a three-year campaign for the American table. Spain’s fortnight in the United States has run from football to finance to food — and the last of the three may quietly be the largest market of all.

The Hispano-Luso Report tracks the Iberian and Latin American business stories that anglophone coverage overlooks — analysed beyond the newswires. Sources: Expansión (Juande Portillo), Interprofesional del Aceite de Oliva Español, El Diario NY, Óleo Revista. If someone forwarded you this, you can subscribe below.