On biodiversity, patience, and why “fast” was never the point of Medéleon
A few weeks ago, we got an email that made me stop what I was doing and just sit with it for a minute. Medéleon had been accepted into the Slow Food Network, a global movement built around three words that, honestly, could double as our mission statement: good, clean, fair.
It’s not an award. There’s no medal, no certificate to frame. But if I’m being honest, it might mean more to me than the ones that do come with a medal.
Here’s why.
The tree that took ten years to matter
In 2016, the Founder Apostolos planted the first Koroneiki tree on a patch of bare land in Katouna, in the hills of Aetolia-Acarnania. No shortcuts, no fast-tracking. Just soil, patience, and a bet that doing this the slow way would eventually be worth it.
It was almost a decade before we bottled our first oil, in early 2026. In an industry where plenty of producers are optimizing for yield, speed, and shelf turnover, that decade probably looked, from the outside, like we were doing it wrong.
We weren’t. We were doing it the only way we actually believe in.
What “slow” means when you’re not just talking about food
Slow Food’s whole premise is that food shouldn’t be reduced to a commodity, that behind every bottle, every loaf, every harvest, there’s a place, a person, and a set of choices that either honor that place or extract from it.
That’s the same philosophy behind the regenerative farming we practice at the grove: building soil instead of depleting it, protecting the wildflowers and insect life that share the land with our trees, treating the ecosystem as something we’re a part of rather than something we manage from above. It’s slower. It’s less predictable. It also happens to be the reason our oil tests at over 820 mg/kg in polyphenols, because healthy, undisturbed soil produces fruit with something real in it.
Joining a network that exists specifically to defend that kind of food, against homogenization, against the pressure to cut corners for scale, felt less like adding a badge to our website and more like finally having a name for what we’d already been doing.
Not every recognition is the same
We’ve been fortunate to pick up a couple of awards this year, a Silver Medal at the Olympia Health & Nutrition Awards, another at LIOOC 2026. Those matter, and we’re proud of them. They tell you something about quality, about how the oil performs against a panel and a set of criteria.
Slow Food tells you something different. It’s not a judgment on the oil in a glass, it’s a statement about how we got there. About the choices upstream of the bottle: the trees we didn’t rush, the soil we didn’t strip, the harvest we still do by hand in early November because machines are faster but hands are gentler.
What happens next
Practically, this means Medéleon is now part of a global community of small producers who share this same conviction, that food tied to a real place, made without compromising the land or the people working it, is worth protecting. It’s a network, not a trophy case. We’re looking forward to what that actually means in practice, beyond the announcement.
For now, though, I just wanted to write this down while it still feels new. Ten years ago, this was one tree and a lot of uncertainty. Today, it’s an oil that’s been recognized twice for what’s in the bottle, and now, once, for how we got there.
Good. Clean. Fair. Turns out, that was the plan all along.
Medéleon is a single-origin, high-phenolic extra virgin olive oil from Katouna, Greece, farmed regeneratively on land planted by hand in 2016. You can read more about our story at medeleon.gr.
