On Sustainability

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

Around a hundred years ago, our family moved across the Messenian bay in Greece, from their ancestral village of Arfara to Karpofora, where they settled and began to plant and cultivate Koroneiki olive trees. Over the last 5 generations, our olive trees have year after year reliably provided our family with a source of food- through wars and poverty, we have always had our oil. As Kala & Mata came to be as a commercial entity, we started to think about how different our family's life would have been had it not been for our dependable groves.

Reality hit us: we are today approaching 100 years of the groves sustaining our family and it's time to try to give back' to nature and minimise whatever negative impact we might have on the climate.

Practically speaking, the effects of climate change are clear on our farm. Over the last few harvests, sudden unpredictable weather, challenges with various pests and other obstacles that haven't been prevalent in the past have begun to appear regularly. With our limited knowledge on the sort of changes we could make, we've tried to better our means of production but with the urgency of the climate crisis, we felt that there needed to be more we could do to make a more noticeable difference.

There is an endless list of things to be done to protect the environment and ecosystem that has sustained our family for over 5 generations, and Kala & Mata is grateful to contribute and to move in a more sustainable direction.