Olive oil is the first thing that goes in the pan when you’re cooking vegetables. It’s the base for salad dressings and marinades, the perfect dipping sauce for bread. Once you find a good one, you may not want to let it go: having a tried-and-true bottle on hand feels like reassurance that every new recipe you try will turn out well. But you may have had trouble finding your favorite in the past few months—and it’s likely that more changes are coming to the olive oil shelves of your local grocery store.

Like any agricultural product, olives are vulnerable to the fickle nature of, well, nature. While some years go by without a hitch, others throw weather challenges at olive farmers—such as unexpected freezes or droughts—that can have devastating effects on the quantity or quality of their crop. As climate change continues to wreak havoc on global weather patterns, predicting and responding to these challenges may become even more difficult for farmers.

In California, which produces more olive oil than any other state in the U.S., 2018 was one of these difficult years. February wrought temperatures as high as 80 degrees Fahrenheit, which invited olive buds to bloom early. Then the cold weather came back—freezing the tender blossoms, which prevented them from forming into flowers and, ultimately, fruit.

Olive blossoms and frost don't mix well. Photo via California Olive Ranch

“Almost all farmers in California were impacted,” says Jim Lipman, VP of production operations at California Olive Ranch, America’s largest olive oil producer. The hot-and-cold 2018 season, Lipman continues, “drastically reduced the size of the crop and impacted fruit quality.”

As the name implies, when California Olive Ranch was founded in 1998, the company built its brand around sourcing olives exclusively from Golden State growers. When, in the fall of 2018, it became clear that working only with local farmers would not be possible that year (unless they substantially reduced the amount of oil they produced), California Olive Ranch needed to consider other options.

The company was in a good position to respond to the crisis. Several years back, in anticipation of changing weather patterns, California Olive Ranch began cultivating relationships with farmers across the world. When the 2018 olive harvest came up short, they began sourcing oils from olives grown in Argentina, Chile, Portugal to blend with their California product. In November 2018, they released these blends with a new label, calling it the “Destination Series.”

The move did not go over well with many home cooks who expected the olives in California Olive Ranch oil to be from … California. This room for misinterpretation of the product seems suspiciously like the kind of thing that California Olive Ranch and other domestic producers campaigned against only a few years ago, when they demanded greater transparency and better labeling of European olive oils. “Yes, customers of California Olive Ranch should most definitely feel duped,” says Tom Mueller, author of Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil.