A plant that has outlived millennia — now climate change is putting it to the test. We spoke with Honest Toil founder Juli Laki.
Honest Toil is unfiltered extra virgin olive oil from a small farm in Greece and the neighbouring groves around it. Juli Laki and her partner Tom founded the brand — they are growers themselves, cold-pressing unfiltered oil from 100% Koroneiki olives. They started fifteen years ago. What began as a way to make a little money has become a well-known extra virgin olive oil across Europe. We talked with Juli about the everyday work of growing olives, how the brand came about, what is particular about the Hungarian market, and what a changing climate is doing to the trees.
You came to making olive oil from a completely different world. How did Honest Toil begin?
We really did stumble into it. Neither moving to Greece nor making olive oil was a conscious decision — more a string of accidents and lucky coincidences. We both worked in the arts, and slowly found ourselves in this country, in this landscape. We fell for the olive trees, the place — and then suddenly we had a great deal of olive oil and no idea what to do with it. We were very young. We weren’t thinking about building a long-term business. The aim was a bit of income, and to be able to travel.
How did you learn the work? Can you really approach growing and oil-making as autodidacts?
We started from zero. When we first harvested in 2009, we had no idea how to do it — we asked the neighbours. The olive tree is a particular plant: you don’t replant it year after year, as you do with most crops, and our trees were already fifty years old then. An olive tree starts to bear fruit after ten or twenty years, and the older it gets, the better the oil — if the soil, the climate and the care are right. Around us there are trees several hundred years old.
At the beginning we simply followed what the people around us were doing. We asked at the village taverna where to take the fruit, and they pointed us to the nearest press — every village has at least one, more often three. We learned a huge amount from Alexander, who owns the press in our village: how to taste, what to look for, what makes an oil good, and how the pressing itself works. Through him, and through our own experience, we began to understand what we were actually doing.
How did a way of life become a real business?
It became clear only gradually that what felt ordinary to us was special to other people. We first tried a market in Berlin, and noticed immediately: people were really interested in buying straight from a grower, and in knowing exactly where the oil came from — which region, which press, which harvest. That was still rare then.
The real breakthrough came in England. Tom and his younger brother went round the trade shows and the shops, with little samples and fresh-harvest oil in their hands — completely DIY, handwritten signs. This was about fifteen years ago. Instagram didn’t exist; Facebook was still in nappies. The relationships we made then — restaurants, retailers — are still the spine of how we work.
What olive variety do you work with, and what is particular about it?
Koroneiki is a distinctly ancient Greek variety, and it is the dominant one on the Peloponnese — especially in our region, Messinia. It is one of the olive varieties with the highest polyphenol content, and it brings a fresh, green, grassy base aroma that really defines how our oil tastes. Low acidity is also typical of the local oil — usually 0.2–0.3%, well below the 0.8% limit for extra virgin. For us, that is one of the most important signs of quality.
There are very marked differences in taste from one olive oil to another. What shapes a product’s flavour?
Tasting olive oil is surprisingly close to tasting wine — it has its own vocabulary, its own kit, its own ritual.
For tasting they use specially made dark-blue, opaque glasses — opaque because the colour of the oil tells you nothing about quality. The first step is the nose, then that characteristic slurp. The judgement is subjective, but it is also professional: the character of the flavour, the bitterness of the oil, and the pepperiness you feel in the throat when you swallow are all important.
That bitterness and pepperiness, by the way, are not a fault — quite the opposite. They come from polyphenols: plant compounds with a strong antioxidant effect, present in particularly large amounts in olive oil. High polyphenol content doesn’t only shape the character of the oil; it is also the basis of its health-protective effect. Some producers specialise in this, and make oils that reach several times the threshold set out in EU guidelines.
Acidity and polyphenol content are also measured in the lab. We have our own analysis done every year — a test of around fifty components, which shows the exact composition of that harvest.
How do you see consumer awareness around olive oil changing?
It has come a long way, but there is still further to go. Plenty of people still treat olive oil as something that can sit on a shelf for years. Most simply buy whatever is in the supermarket. They don’t think of it as a living substance, with an origin and a story. Olive oil is as seasonal as wine: it has a harvest, it has a vintage; flavour is shaped by soil, weather, growing, picking and processing. That way of thinking — knowing what we eat and where it comes from — is spreading, but with olive oil we are still behind other foods.
Was there a difference in how people received the oil in England and in Hungary?
In England there was already a market for artisan produce — a layer of customers willing to pay a little more for guaranteed quality, and who value a direct link with the grower. In Hungary that outlook is only forming now, and the layer of people who both want these products and can pay for them is still thinner.
In England there was a scene we could embed ourselves in. In Hungary we grew more or less in parallel with the restaurants and shops where the quality and origin of ingredients actually mattered. England is in a real olive-oil renaissance at the moment — it has been going for about two or three years. We are of course very glad of it, because the traceability, freshness and grower-minded approach now coming to the fore have been the basis of our brand and how we work from the start.
What we brought was that reliability, combined with a playful attitude and a price people could actually reach. That wasn’t a conscious strategy — neither of us studied business or marketing — it simply came from inside, naturally. These days, though, the competition is quite fierce. Brands have appeared with thirty-person teams, serious PR, bigger budgets.
What is stopping grower olive oil from becoming as widespread in Hungary as it is in Western countries?
Hungary is a country of sunflower oil and pork fat — that culture doesn’t change overnight. There is nothing wrong with that in itself: regional and seasonal eating matters. But it also matters that the oils we cook with in quantity, or eat raw, support our health. Plenty of people still carry an early trauma: that olive oil is something unpleasant-tasting, said to be healthy, but not actually nice. That prejudice is slowly loosening.
Here too, restaurants started the change. Our earliest customers were chefs — they were the first to see potential in what we were doing. Today we supply about twenty to thirty restaurants in Budapest and around the country, and that circle keeps growing. The restaurant market is unstable, though: if a place has to save money, olive oil is one of the first things they cut. A very important aim of ours is to make the quality reachable for a wider audience as well.
From food taxation to school canteens — what might steer Hungarian consumers towards quality grower products?
This is a question where the answer is partly decided from above. Whether someone buys a quality grower product doesn’t hang mainly on consumer habits — it also hangs on which products the state makes available, and at a price people can pay. In Hungary today olive oil sits under 27% VAT, while pork is taxed at 5%. In England, for example, all food is at 0% VAT, but foods high in unhealthy fat, salt or sugar carry a separate tax.
In Hungary, for now, the opposite is true: fat and white flour are cheaper than a bottle of good oil. Putting olive oil, and healthy foods more generally, under a reduced VAT rate wouldn’t solve everything on its own, but it could make a noticeable difference to prices — and it would send a signal. The real breakthrough, I think, lies in education, and especially in school meals. If children first meet good ingredients in the canteen, that shapes their habits in the long run. That is the point where a conscious food policy could actually have an effect — not only on a narrow layer of consumers, but on everyone.
There is a great deal of talk now about the effects of climate change, including the rising price of olive oil. How much do you notice changing conditions in day-to-day life?
Last year it didn’t rain until November — almost unthinkable here, because rain traditionally comes from autumn through to spring. This year, by contrast, there was torrential rain and more serious flooding. The weather has become completely unpredictable, and with it the timing of the harvest, and in part the quality and quantity of the oil. The olive tree reacts slowly: what happened two or three years ago is only really showing on the trees now. As the weather has become less predictable, pests and fungal species have appeared that were not typical of this region at all.
Meanwhile olive growing is shifting north. There are already olive groves in Hungary, and on Crete some farmers are cutting down olive trees and planting avocado in their place. That is staggering, because the olive is a cultivated heritage thousands of years old — and all of this could transform in a few decades. The basis of the Mediterranean diet is the abundance and quality of olive oil, and that is closely tied to the fact that many of the world’s “blue zones” — where people live longest on average — are in the Mediterranean.
How do you stay economically sustainable with this much uncertainty?
Luckily our model is flexible: we don’t rely on a single farm. We source oil from several small growers, several presses. So far, every year, we have managed to grow and buy enough oil of the right quality — but that can’t be stretched forever. It also matters to know that olive trees have a natural two-year rhythm: one year more generous, the next more scarce. That is completely normal, and yet very few people know about it. Olive oil is not a constant, predictable product — it is a living thing, dependent on weather and vintage, like wine. In the business, the busiest stretch runs from September to January. October–November is olive harvest; processing the fresh crop coincides with the Christmas season — that is when the pressure is greatest, logistically and in terms of marketing. By January that period eases off somewhat, and that is when we plan how the rest of the year looks.
How much has the Honest Toil team grown since the beginning, where is the business expanding, and what is the most important market?
The core of the business is small. Tom and I work on the foundations; in Hungary I have a part-time assistant who handles the orders. In England Tom’s younger brother takes care of orders; alongside him a colleague takes on operations and some of the strategic planning, and someone helps with SEO, newsletters and other practical things. We distribute in Berlin, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, and — perhaps surprisingly — Taiwan. Our biggest market is clearly England, but the Hungarian presence is absolutely close to our heart.
Interview by Zsanett Kertész
6 April 2026
