Stamatopoulos & Sons Olive oil
Vendor
We grew up in a home overflowing with olive oil. We took it for granted and assumed everyone was like that. When we first bought olive oil in a grocery store, we were shocked at how awful it was. We figured it was just the specific bottle we had purchased. Years later, we found that it wasn't just that bottle but actually almost all the olive oil in grocery stores was a fraud--labeled something it truly didn't qualify for and it only got worse from there.
By 2011, Highly viewed articles hit the newspapers, public interest stories about olive oil were on TV, best selling books about the fraud were hitting the shelves and UC Davis had published three consecutive research papers highlighting the widespread fraud and mislabeling. It was like the world was being alerted that there was bad olive oil was everywhere. But where did that leave us?
In 2013, we took our olive oil to UC Davis-the epicenter for olive oil research and information in the world. We took a course on identifying extra virgin olive oil and submitted our olive oils for rigorous testing at the highly accredited institution.
All our olive oils were certified extra virgin. All of them had very high scores for both their lab and sensory testing. We always knew we had great olive oil, now we had proof and the experts telling us that we had something amazing to offer the market.
By that time, we had already been selling in local farmers' markets. We were a natural fit in the markets. The customers were already aware of a lot of the things we were talking about. The vendors loved that our product was complimentary to many of the other items sold in the markts. We are proud to have participated in dozens of markets over the last 9 years.
Antibiotic And Hormone Free Non Gmo Extended Growing Season
We go way beyond the rest of the industry by maximizing our use of known best practices combined with our family's centuries of experience in the same olive groves. We carefully hand-picking our olives, quickly turning them into superior quality olive oil with state of the art machinery and storing in stainless steel before bottling.
Practices for picking and processing olives into olive oil varies throughout the world. Only a very small percentage of the world's olive oil is extra virgin. Extra virgin olive oil requires high quality, extremely fresh fruit that is processed within 24 hours of being picked.
Time and technique:
Olives are typically harvested off the ground in most parts of the world including other parts of Greece but generally throughout the world. Our practice is to handpick the olives off the trees to keep them as fresh as possible and without being damaged or starting to decompose.
After harvest:
Most olives sit for days until they are turned into olive oil. We hand pick the olives in the morning and have them processed to olive oil in the evening. So they are not idle for long before becoming amazing olive oil.
Processing:
We have access to the local olive oil mill used by farmers in the whole area. It is a very organized system where farmers can plan their harvest date so they have a guaranteed place to process. The olive mill is paid directly with a percentage of olive oil. It is in the mill's best interest to have the best quality olive oil as well because it is worth more to them.
The olive mill is the heart of the economy in south Greece and it is treated as such with state of the art equipment that is cared for as if the life of the operators depend on it, because they do.
We use a centrifuge system that seperates the oil from the olive fruit, pit, sticks, leaves and water. Olive Oil is typically spun for about 40 minutes at a time with the temperature never exceeding 25C.
Around the web