Food & Agriculture

The UC Davis Olive Center released a new olive oil and vinegar gift set just in time for the holiday season. The set comes with three 100ml bottles of garlic-infused olive oil, which adds rich flavor to bread, vegetables, grilled meats and even popcorn; an extra virgin olive oil with robust flavors of fresh-cut grass, green almond and herbs; and a balsamic vinegar made in the Modena region of northern Italy with flavors of toasted caramel, ripe grapes and red currant.

California produces a wide range of organic fruits, vegetables, nuts and dairy, and demand for those products has helped drive the growth of organic agriculture for decades. New research by the University of California, Davis, shows that growth has not continued evenly across the state.

California produces 2.4 billion pounds of cheese each year and the leftovers from making your favorite feta, gouda and cheddar could be the source of compostable biodegradable plastics like packaging, spoons and cup liners. 

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, are working with the dairy industry to turn these so-called co-products or byproducts into bioplastics, and scaling up the technology could help the state meet a goal for all single-use packaging to be recyclable or compostable by 2032. 

You’ve likely heard this assumption: When AI-enabled and autonomous machines arrive on the farm, jobs will disappear. But researchers at the University of California, Davis, who studied 16 fruit tree operations in California and Washington for three years, found that automation still takes human knowledge. What changes is how the work gets done.

Jorge Dubcovsky, distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher has been named the 2026 World Agriculture Prize Laureate in the category for countries classified as having a developed economy. 

A quarter-century after its founding, the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science is a place of groundbreaking discoveries, collaborations and educational offerings attracting top-notch students, scholars and researchers. 

A transformational gift of $25 million from the Robert and Margrit Mondavi family in 2001 established the RMI to study, advance and improve wine, brewing and food sciences.

As the climate warms, people are more exposed to heat stress, which depresses their productivity and the global economy. A study from the University of California, Davis, quantifies the cost of heat stress on global labor. 

The study, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, estimates that each ton of carbon dioxide emitted in 2025 cost $41 in lost productivity. 

What if the methane from landfills and wastewater treatment plants could become an affordable raw material for sustainable plastics? 

Some naturally occurring bacteria, called methanotrophs, can consume methane and use its carbon to produce biodegradable plastics, which are stored inside their cells. But producing plastic is only part of the puzzle. Recovering and purifying it from the bacteria contributes significantly to costs; thus, reducing these costs can help make methane-derived bioplastics economically competitive with conventional plastics. 

Tobacco products and food often share shelf space in neighborhood stores. A research team led by the University of California, Davis, examined those shelves to see whether a Sacramento city policy was actually increasing access to healthy food.

If you've been reaching for chips, mayonnaise or salad dressing labeled "made with avocado oil," there's a good chance the oil inside isn't pure avocado oil, despite it being the only listed oil ingredient. University of California, Davis, researchers tested processed foods marketed as containing avocado oil. They found 48 of the 54 avocado oil-labeled products were adulterated with cheaper oils. The study was published in Applied Food Research.