The first Honest Toil went to Berlin on a borrowed cargo bike and sold out at flea markets within days, fresh oil in recycled bottles, a friend's paper cut-out for a label. By Tom's telling, the beginning was 2009. He and Juli Laki were harvesting a tiny grove just south of Kyparissia, the one his family took on when they moved to Greece, and they picked early, before the fruit was fully ripe, the local practice called agourelaio. The harvest is still done by hand: sticks with propeller ends, which they call ticklers, tap the olives onto nets spread under the trees, and the birds in the grove are left in peace.

The oil is pressed at village presses that run the way they have for centuries: farmers bring their olives and hand the press a share of the oil in payment, family businesses held together by trust. The pressing is mechanical and never warmer than 27 degrees, a few kilometres from the trees, and the oil goes out unfiltered, the sediment of skins and pips still in it. Their own harvest no longer covers what Honest Toil sells; rather than take on more land, Tom and Juli work with selected small farms nearby, which keeps an income in the village. They sample the oil from every press batch and let it differ, instead of standardising it into one house taste.

Pressed in the village, tasted batch by batch, never quite the same twice.