Supermarkets have begun chaining together five-liter bottles of olive oil and padlocking them to shelves to prevent theft, while others are fitting the bottles with security tags that have to be removed by staff.


Spain is the world’s largest producer of olive oil, but Europe has almost run out of local supplies after extreme weather damaged the harvests for a second year. Global production is expected to fall to 2.4m tonnes, according to the International Olive Council, less than last year’s harvest and well short of global demand of about 3m tonnes.