On Sustainability

How we decided to take action and the intiatives we are taking to make a difference.

A hundred years on the same land

Around a century ago, our family moved across the Messinian bay from their ancestral village of Arfara to Karpofora, where they settled and began planting Koroneiki olive trees. Over five generations, those groves have provided our family with a reliable source of food and income through wars, poverty, and political upheaval. As Kala & Mata grew into a commercial business, we started to think about how different our family's life would have been without those trees, and what we owed back to the land that has carried us this far.

What climate change looks like on a farm

The effects of a changing climate are increasingly visible on our land. Recent harvests have brought sudden, unpredictable weather, longer dry spells, and pest pressures that previous generations did not face on the same scale. We have adjusted cultivation practices where we can, but the urgency of the broader crisis pushed us to look for ways to contribute beyond our own farm gate. Sustainability is not a finished project. We are continuing to improve cultivation practices on the family groves, looking at the carbon footprint of our shipping operations, and exploring how the bag-in-box format reduces packaging weight relative to glass for the same volume of oil. As specific commitments take shape, we will publish them here.