Olive Oil Nutri-Score: What Changed in the 2024 Update

An extra virgin olive oil bottle has carried a Nutri-Score B since 2024, against a C or a D a few years earlier — without a single gram of the oil's composition changing. For a private label buyer building a bottled range, the question is not only which grade the oil will earn, but whether to print the logo at all, given that a Nutri-Score commitment, once made, is not limited to a single SKU. Here is what the score actually measures, what changed in its calculation, and where its legal status stands today.

A nutrition label, not a health claim

Nutri-Score is a five-band logo (A to E, dark green to red) printed on the front of pack, computed by an algorithm that weighs favourable elements — fibre, protein, the presence of fruit, vegetables, legumes, or olive, rapeseed and walnut oil in the ingredient list — against unfavourable ones: energy, saturated fat, sugar, salt. Designed by a French public health team under Professor Serge Hercberg, it has never had a harmonised EU legal basis: each member state that adopts it does so through a voluntary agreement with the companies that choose to display it.

That is a legal distinction worth holding onto: it is not a nutrition or health claim under Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006. A claim such as the olive oil polyphenols claim answers to a fixed wording and a precise analytical threshold — we cover that mechanism in our article on the polyphenols health claim. Nutri-Score carries no claimed property at all: it is a synthetic summary of a product's overall nutritional profile, governed not by an EU regulation but by a usage charter and a public algorithm, published and maintained by Santé publique France, the body that has run the scheme since its 2017 launch.

The 2024 revision: why olive oil moved up a band

The original algorithm penalised any fat purely on energy density, without distinguishing the type of fatty acid involved. An extra virgin olive oil, rich in oleic acid but as calorie-dense as any oil, landed in band D — in a consumer's mind, on a par with an ultra-processed product. The Nutri-Score's international scientific committee revised that calculation: the version published in late 2023 and applied from the end of April 2024 factors in fatty-acid composition for the first time, crediting mono- and polyunsaturated fats. As a result, a standard extra virgin olive oil moves from D to B, alongside rapeseed oil, walnut oil and high-oleic sunflower oil — companies were given a two-year window to adapt their packaging to the new calculation.

Professor Hercberg described the change as "a stricter algorithm, but also a more effective one for health and for consumers." The gain still needs qualifying for a professional buyer: a premium, high-polyphenol extra virgin oil and a refined olive-pomace oil, with very different sensory and nutritional profiles, can land on nearly the same band because the calculation still runs on macronutrients — not on freshness, acidity, or phenolic content. A B grade never substitutes for reading the lot's certificate of analysis.

Where olive oil stands against other fats

Fat	Nutri-Score pre-revision	Nutri-Score since 2024
Extra virgin olive oil	D	B
Rapeseed oil	C	B
Standard sunflower oil	D	C
High-oleic sunflower oil	C	B
Refined olive-pomace oil	D	B/C depending on formulation
Palm oil	E	D/E
Butter	E	E

The table shows the calculation's driving logic: unsaturated fats, olive included, gain the most ground; tropical fats high in saturates stay near the bottom of the scale despite the revision.

Mandatory or voluntary? France's near-miss in late 2025

As of 2026, Nutri-Score remains a voluntary scheme in every country that has adopted it: France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and Portugal all run it on that basis, with each company signing a usage charter with the body responsible in its market. Italy has formally opposed the scheme since its launch, arguing it unfairly penalises typical Italian products — olive oil, cured meats, cheese — that carry recognised fat or salt content despite their place in the Mediterranean diet; Rome instead promotes its own alternative, the NutrInform Battery, built on percentages of daily reference intake rather than a single letter grade.

France came close to changing the picture at the end of 2025. On the night of 7–8 November, the National Assembly passed an amendment to the social security financing bill making Nutri-Score display mandatory, with an exemption for products under an official quality scheme (PDO, PGI, Label Rouge). The Senate rejected that obligation on 21 November, and the final text — Law No. 2025-1403 of 30 December 2025 — dropped the mandatory rollout altogether. Nutri-Score therefore stays optional for now, but the episode is a reminder that a buyer building a range for the French market should track this file rather than treat it as settled.

The all-or-nothing rule for a brand

The detail most private label buyers miss when they first look at the scheme: a company that signs the Nutri-Score charter commits to printing it across its whole range within the covered scope, on a set timeline, with no option to cherry-pick only the well-scoring lines. For a retailer already running Nutri-Score on other categories, adding an olive oil to its private label assortment falls mechanically inside that scope. For a brand building its olive oil range in isolation, the decision plays out differently: a B grade on the oil is not, by itself, enough to decide — it needs weighing against the coherence of the wider portfolio and whatever commitment to the logo already exists or doesn't.

There is also a category-mix question worth raising with a retail buyer before signing anything: a chain that displays Nutri-Score on packaged foods but sells its oils loose or in unlabelled dispensers falls outside the charter's scope for that line, which is why some retailers keep bottled ranges out of a Nutri-Score commitment even after adopting it elsewhere in the store. None of this is a reason to avoid the logo — a B grade is a genuine selling point next to a sunflower or palm-based competitor — but it is a decision to make with the full range in view, not SKU by SKU.

What Nutri-Score does not replace

Nutri-Score measures none of acidity, peroxide value, polyphenol content, or harvest freshness — the parameters that separate a premium extra virgin oil from an entry-level one that meets the same regulatory minimum. Nor does it replace the mandatory label content covered in our guide to EU olive oil labelling rules, which remains the legal baseline regardless of the choice made on the nutrition logo. A buyer building a quality argument around their oil should always document it with a lot-specific COA, whether or not a Nutri-Score band ends up printed on the finished label.

This gap matters commercially as much as it matters legally. Two extra virgin oils sitting on the same shelf, both carrying a Nutri-Score B, can differ sharply on polyphenol content, oxidative stability and sensory intensity — none of which the logo communicates. A private label programme that leans only on the nutrition grade to justify a price point is leaving its actual differentiator, the oil's analytical profile, unspoken on the pack.

Building a Nutri-Score decision on solid ground

Whether to print Nutri-Score on a bulk olive oil destined for bottling is not an isolated technical call: it commits an entire range to a French regulatory file that is still moving. Virginia scopes this kind of trade-off from the brief on your bottled oil projects, alongside the parameters that don't shift with regulatory fashion — acidity, K232/K270, polyphenols on request, a COA per lot. Request a quote to frame your label positioning, branded or private label, on our volumes of bulk Tunisian olive oil.