SEGGIANO, Italy — On the steep hills of southern Tuscany, Romain Piro has spent the past two decades harvesting fruit from his silvery olive trees and turning it into olive oil.
In 2019, he convinced his sister, Marie-Charlotte Piro, to go into business with him. The siblings started shipping their small-batch bottles to the United States, where olive oil is in high demand — but where very little is made. Americans consume almost 400,000 tons of olive oil annually, more than any other country except Italy, and import some 95% of it.
"One would be crazy not to export to the U.S., because it's an amazing market," Romain Piro says. "And I hope it's going to stay this way."
At first, Olio Piro found success in the United States — racking up sales, industry awards and high-profile fans at Michelin-starred restaurants. But now, it's looking elsewhere for growth, thanks to President Trump's new tariffs on almost everything the United States imports, including olive oil. For months, the Piro siblings have watched Trump threaten and then retreat from potential taxes as high as 30%, before announcing a deal with the European Union last week to seemingly finalize tariffs at 15%.
Details are still being hammered out. The European Union is still hoping to negotiate some exemptions for wine and other agricultural products, and some olive oil industry members tell NPR they haven't given up on the possibility of a reprieve. And 15% is better than the worst-case scenario — but it's still a steep new tax for European olive oil producers, who have spent the last few years struggling with high heat and poor harvests.
For startups like Olio Piro, which has limited resources and ability to withstand financial shocks, surviving this year's trade chaos has meant looking for more stable trading partners. So as Trump took office early this year, the Piro siblings moved up their plans to start exporting to other countries, including Canada, Japan and Germany.
"We were always planning to be global, but we were not planning to go global that fast," Marie-Charlotte Piro says. "The uncertainty was really difficult to handle."
The United States is dependent on foreign (olive) oil
Once a specialty ingredient, olive oil has become a crucial food source for Americans. But the United States doesn't — and can't — make most of the olive oil it wants. Domestic farmers and producers, mostly in California, supply only 5% of the olive oil Americans buy. Everything else is imported, mostly from Spain and Italy.
"We are woefully dependent on foreign oil," says Joseph R. Profaci, executive director of the North American Olive Oil Association, a trade group representing both domestic and international producers, including Olio Piro.
This dependency has created opportunities for entrepreneurs like the Piro siblings, who grew up in France before starting down two very different paths. Romain is the dreamer: He followed a Buddhist monk to Tuscany, where — while studying and volunteering at the local Buddhist cultural center — he started farming as a day job. When he began making olive oil, he sold it by loading up the back of his Volkswagen van, "driving to Paris, knocking on the back door of Michelin-starred restaurants and selling the olive oil in the alley," his sister recalls. "The chefs loved it — but it was not a scalable business."
Meanwhile, Marie-Charlotte had moved to Miami and jumped into its real estate boom. "I had been selling overpriced condos for 20 years — and did extremely well," she laughs. When Romain finally convinced her to team up, "I was very confident that I could do the same with a very high-quality olive oil — that was not overpriced but that was more expensive than the other ones around them."
Indeed, Olio Piro sells a half-liter bottle of olive oil for $56 — a price that analysts call "superpremium" and that even Marie-Charlotte acknowledges is higher than she would like. She blames some of that on Olio Piro's up-front costs as a quality-focused small producer: It harvests olives only by hand, and it uses a modern type of milling technology that can be more expensive than what most olive oil producers use.
Some of those unit costs will come down as Olio Piro scales up. And with sales growing, Marie-Charlotte had thought this year would be the time.
"We've been waiting for this moment, to be able to lower our prices, for three years," she says. "Selling a $56 bottle of olive oil is really hard."
But the tariffs have changed her plans. And she's not alone: Even the world's largest olive oil producer is bracing for tariff chaos. Spain's Deoleo, the owner of brands including Bertolli, relies on the U.S. for more than a quarter of its sales. Its CEO recently told CNBC.com that Trump's tariffs would ultimately raise prices for U.S. consumers. (The company did not respond to an NPR request for comment.)
Yet as the tariffs roil European olive oil producers, their U.S. competitors can't reap many benefits. Trump has said that his new taxes will encourage more domestic production and thus create more U.S. jobs. But as with avocados or coffee beans, olive oil industry members and analysts say domestic farmers just can't grow enough olives to meet U.S. demand.
Olive trees require California-like climates, which few other U.S. states share. And even if California farmers started planting more olive trees this year, those trees wouldn't start producing olives for several years.
"Olive oil has become essential to the American kitchen — and it's also something that you just can't really get anywhere near to satisfying demand for domestically," says Randy Burt, a consumer products analyst for AlixPartners.
He predicts that Trump's new tariffs will likely result in higher prices for U.S. consumers. If that happens, he expects some shoppers to switch to cheaper alternatives.
"Personally, I don't think any of them are as good as olive oil," Burt says. "But that's what happens when prices tick up."
People on tight budgets are most likely to switch to vegetable oils, like sunflower or canola oil. Those are also known as "seed oils" — which have been criticized as unhealthy by Trump's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Many nutrition and science researchers have told NPR that while seed oils may not be as healthy as olive oil, the claims that they're harmful to health are overblown.)
The North American Olive Oil Association has tried to appeal to the Trump administration and Kennedy's "Make America Healthy Again" agenda. This spring, the group met with lawmakers and held an event in Washington highlighting olive oil's health benefits and its inadequate domestic production, arguing that lawmakers should exempt olive oil from the tariffs.
The efforts have not yielded any apparent results, but Profaci, the trade group's director, hasn't given up hope. As the European Union attempts to negotiate tariff exemptions for agricultural products that the United States does not produce much of, Profaci plans to continue advocating for olive oil: "We of course think it makes perfect sense to protect American consumers, especially for healthy products," he said in an email after the trade deal.
Spokespeople for the White House and the United States trade representative did not respond to requests for comment.
A game plan that expands beyond the U.S.
It may be months before U.S. consumers start seeing the full impact of a 15% tariff hit their European olive oil prices. As with so many other products, some companies are likely to try to eat some of the costs, at least initially. And some large producers could have rushed to ship more bottles before the higher tariffs went into effect — although as a perishable good, olive oil can't be stockpiled indefinitely.
But these coping strategies are more out of reach for small businesses like Olio Piro, which had $500,000 in sales last year — and which doesn't have the financial cushion that its biggest competitors do.
So early this year, Olio Piro started pivoting. Marie-Charlotte brought on an export manager and more staff to research its new markets and start handling logistics — everything from translating websites to figuring out which local trade shows they should attend. She's also raising money from investors and planning to invest 150,000 euros in Piro's global expansion this year.
"It's a pretty large process … and for us, it's a very large number," she says.
Meanwhile, the White House has yet to provide much detail on its trade agreement with the European Union — meaning that the Piro siblings, as well as their entire industry, are still facing some uncertainty.
It's affecting producers in different ways. Larger olive oil producers tend to store their olive oil after the fall harvest and then ship throughout the year, meaning that many have had to navigate the changing U.S. tariff rates on a daily or weekly basis.
But at least in this case, being small has worked to Olio Piro's advantage. Its next olive harvest doesn't start until October, after which it will have to bottle the oil. Then Piro will ship its new harvest all at once, early next year — meaning that its founders have a little more time for the details of the EU's trade deal to shake out.
So Marie-Charlotte Piro can wait until January to figure out how much olive oil she will ship to the United States — and how much she'll send to new customers elsewhere, like in Canada.
"When we are ready to get on the boat, this is when we are going to decide," she says. "The choice will be made according to the level of the tariffs."
Copyright 2025 NPR