Award-Winning Producer Promotes Rhodes as An Olive Oil Destination

Summary

The Kallas fam­ily in Rhodes has put the island on the map as a top olive oil-pro­duc­ing region, win­ning awards at the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition and empha­siz­ing high-qual­ity pro­duc­tion despite chal­lenges from cli­mate change and wild­fires. Natura Rodos cul­ti­vates 2,000 olive trees of four dif­fer­ent vari­eties, with a focus on main­tain­ing the high­est qual­ity of their olive oils through care­ful mon­i­tor­ing and extrac­tion processes.

A pop­u­lar tourist des­ti­na­tion for Greeks and for­eign­ers alike, the island of Rhodes in the south­east­ern Aegean Sea is not the first region that springs to mind when it comes to Greek olive oil.

However, the love of the Kallas fam­ily for olive trees has put Rhodes on the map of the country’s top olive oil-pro­duc­ing regions.

The Kallases have cul­ti­vated olive trees for gen­er­a­tions; their first olive oil was pro­duced in 1959. Over the years, the fam­ily real­ized the way for­ward was to brand olive oil instead of sell­ing it in bulk. The first olive oil from their olive groves was bot­tled in the late 1990s.

In 2000, the fam­ily moved all their oper­a­tions to the vil­lage of Theologos in north­west Rhodes, found­ing Natura Rodos.

A turn­ing point for the com­pany was its maiden par­tic­i­pa­tion in the 2020 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, where it won a Silver Award. Since then, Natura Rodos has con­sis­tently been awarded at the world’s largest olive oil qual­ity con­test.

“The mes­sage we wanted to send is that, apart from a top tourist des­ti­na­tion, Rhodes is also a place where high-qual­ity olive oil is pro­duced,” said Stavros Kallas, the company’s chief exec­u­tive. ​“In the fol­low­ing years, we did not stop try­ing our best and earned a Gold Award in New York in 2022.”

“It is such a plea­sure for us that our prod­uct was able to make its way abroad and be intro­duced to peo­ple from other con­ti­nents and cul­tures,” he added. ​“Customers are always eager to try some­thing that has been awarded and known to exceed spe­cific stan­dards of both qual­ity and taste.”

In the 2023 NYIOOC, the com­pany won another Gold Award for its Koroneiki extra vir­gin olive oil, fol­lowed by a Silver Award in 2024.

“Our efforts were rewarded in the best way pos­si­ble, ensur­ing our pres­ence among the best olive oils in the world,” Kallas said.

“This year’s award was espe­cially sig­nif­i­cant because it was a really dif­fi­cult year for us,” he added. ​“As a result of last year’s dev­as­tat­ing wild­fires, our island’s crops and nat­ural envi­ron­ment were severely affected, and we wit­nessed the effects of cli­mate change on the island’s ecosys­tem.”

Natura Rodos cul­ti­vates 2,000 olive trees of four dif­fer­ent vari­eties: the Greek Koroneiki, the Italian Frantoio and the Spanish Arbequina and Picual. Around a quar­ter of the company’s trees are organ­i­cally grown.

Kallas said that the Koroneiki trees have the high­est yield of their olive vari­eties, while the trees of the two Spanish cul­ti­vars are the youngest in the fam­ily groves.

The Frantoio olive trees, on the other hand, have their roots in the Italian occu­pa­tion of Rhodes, which started in the early 1910s and lasted for 30 years.

“Growing olive trees of dif­fer­ent vari­eties also gives us some flex­i­bil­ity since their fruits can be picked at slightly dif­fer­ent times dur­ing har­vest,” he said.

However, like almost every other olive oil pro­ducer in the Mediterranean basin, Natura Rodos is affected by cli­mate change.

“The increased tem­per­a­tures dur­ing the flow­er­ing of the trees and the marked reduc­tion in rain­fall impact the olive oil yield of our trees,” Kallas said. ​“We had to irri­gate most of our olive groves to main­tain our pro­duc­tion capac­ity and the high organolep­tic char­ac­ter­is­tics of our olive oils.”

Kallas added that wild­fires are another sig­nif­i­cant threat Rhodian farm­ers face, with many of the island’s olive trees burn­ing yearly.

“Our trees have so far remained unaf­fected by fires, but we have noticed that our sales drop sig­nif­i­cantly in fire-stricken areas,” he said.

“Fires are an unpre­dictable fac­tor that causes anx­i­ety to all the island’s olive grow­ers,” Kallas added. ​“For this rea­son, we con­stantly clear our groves from dry grass and weeds in the sum­mer and apply all fire-pro­tec­tion mea­sures.”

Rhodes, known in Greece as the ​‘Emerald Island,’ is the country’s fourth-largest island and home to more than 1.5 mil­lion olive trees, pri­mar­ily Greek cul­ti­vars.

Last August, large swathes of agri­cul­tural land, includ­ing 50,000 olive trees, were dam­aged by a wild­fire that burned for more than ten days in cen­tral and east­ern Rhodes.

Kallas empha­sized that Natura Rodos’s per­ma­nent goal is to main­tain the high­est qual­ity of its olive oils.

“We keep the acid­ity of our extra vir­gin olive oils low and con­stantly mon­i­tor all the para­me­ters dur­ing extrac­tion to be within lim­its,” he said. ​”We pre­fer to get a lower quan­tity of oil than los­ing the del­i­cate organolep­tic char­ac­ter­is­tics of our olive oils.”

“We knew we had a qual­ity prod­uct in our hands, so we decided to enter the New York com­pe­ti­tion in the first place,” Kallas added. ​“Our island, Rhodes, also receives acclaim from our recog­ni­tion at the NYIOOC, becom­ing known as a place that pro­duces high-qual­ity, fla­vor­ful agri­cul­tural prod­ucts.”