Honest Toil – Unfiltered, Unblended, & Uncompromisingly Fresh Olive Oil

Bringing Pure, Small-Batch Olive Oil from Greece to the UK

Emberton Fayre is proud to supply Honest Toil’s extra virgin olive oil, a truly unfiltered, unblended, and cold-pressed oil straight from the groves of the Peloponnese, Greece. More than just a product, Honest Toil represents a deep connection between land, tradition, and community, delivering fresh, high-polyphenol olive oil that retains the raw, grassy essence of the Koroneiki olive.

With a direct, hands-on approach from harvest to bottle, Honest Toil guarantees a level of freshness and purity rarely found elsewhere. The result? A bold, peppery olive oil with a stunning green hue, packed with flavour and rich in health-boosting polyphenols.

Discover the difference of genuinely small-batch, artisanal olive oil – fresh from the press, exactly as it should be.

Tom & Juil at Honest Toil

Who are Honest Toil?

Honest Toil is a small project run by Tom & Juli. They are based just south of Kyparissia, on the west coast of the Peloponnese, Greece and bring extra virgin olive oil from their village to the UK. More than just a business, Honest Toil is also the history of their wanderings and a way to connect homes & families. For this reason, they take it especially seriously.

While harvesting in their own small groves, they also work together with other smallholders and the local press, supporting the local economy and making sure that the high-quality extra virgin olive oil from the area doesn't end up blended into commercial oils by big companies. 

As the two of them have a uniquely direct control over the whole process, from picking to pressing and packing, they always have the fresh oil available by January each year. 
The fact that they’re so hands-on also enables them to have sustainability at the core of the project. The olives used for Honest Toil oil come exclusively from small family farms, and are hand-harvested using traditional methods, without unnecessary strain on the tree or the disruption of wildlife. The olives are pressed in the family-owned village press and the oil is packed locally. 

A message from Tom...

'We’re determined to share an olive oil that’s exactly how it comes here in the village, fresh from the press; it’s completely unfiltered, so once pressed, it isn’t put through any additional processes. Everything is pressed the same day it’s picked and the oil has an acidity of between 0.2-0.3%, which is pretty impressively low. It’s also completely unblended: unlike most “extra virgin olive oil” found on supermarket shelves, it really is small-batch production, and isn’t mixed with inferior oils or oil from previous harvests… consequently it tastes ridiculously good. As it's unfiltered, the oil contains the sediment from olive skins and pips, giving it a great green opaqueness with a thick texture, and the raw, grassy result is pretty much the same thing the ancient Greeks would have consumed!

Tom from Honest Toil

Both the lands and the village presses here are locally owned and run as family businesses – groves with a few hundred trees are considered large farms, which is in stark contrast to the intensive, large-scale olive oil production characteristic of other big olive cultivating regions. We harvest the olives with traditional, manual, low-impact methods, using sticks with ‘propeller-like’ endings that remove the olives from the branches, letting them fall onto large nets spread underneath the trees. The olives are then gathered into sacks and taken to the village press in the evening.

Presses here still function on a collective basis: farmers bring in the harvested olives and hand over a percentage of the oil in exchange for the pressing. Everyone knows everyone and the whole process is based on trust – this is how’s been for centuries. Together with Tom’s family, we look after our four small olive groves, harvesting them with the help of family and friends every year. As customers have started to notice that our oil really is something different, we’ve debated taking a loan to buy more olive trees, but instead decided to employ a different model and work with the other small farmers in the neighbourhood. This way, we guarantee an income for them and support local, traditional forms of olive picking, making sure that the high quality extra virgin olive oil from these groves ends up directly on your table instead of being mixed in with inferior oils by big-scale, big-production corporations.

Our whole ethos is based on direct cooperation; with small-scale farmers, as well as small businesses along the line, including delivery, distributors and the stockists that ultimately sell the fruits of our toil...

We’re determined to keep it simple, so just produce the one variety of olive, and the result is a properly cold-pressed, completely unblended and unfiltered extra virgin olive oil; it really is just raw squashed Koroneiki olives.'

Polyphenols:

'We had our fresh harvest olive oil tested in November - it's an expensive test, but despite the fact that the count lowers significantly over the year, more and more people seem to be using Polyphenol as a guide to quality, so we thought it time to get tested...

The batch from the November 2024 crop had a Polyphenol level of 537mg/kg - significantly above the 250mg/kg EU Regulation to be regarded as "high-polyphenol" content olive oil...

Our oil is "agoureleo" (early harvest), properly cold-pressed, and solely from Koroneiki olives (the olive variety with the highest polyphenol count in the world!). We pick before fully ripe, and press the same day, so all the necessities for the much-coveted high Polyphenol content are present & correct.'