A Tale of Greek Enterprise and Olive Oil, Smothered in Red Tape
Published: March 18, 2012
(Page 2 of 2)
In marketing olive oils, olive wood and olive-based cosmetics, he is focusing on a product category that many experts say Greece could do a lot more with. The McKinsey report, for instance, said that Greece was the third-largest producer of olive oil in the world but exported 60 percent of its output to Italy in bulk. This allows Italy to capture an extra 50 percent premium on the price of the final product.
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But Mr. Antonopoulos’s entrance into e-business ran into trouble almost from the start. Finding prize-winning olive oil was not hard, he said. Nor was convincing farmers that they needed to find prettier bottles.
But getting a small warehouse in Athens was a nightmare. No warehouses are allowed in the city. Instead, he had to settle on a storefront and cover up the windows.
And there were permits and certificates to be obtained from the tax office, the pension office, the Chamber of Commerce, the Health Department, the Building Department, the Fire Department and more.
Mr. Antonopoulos and his three partners took turns waiting in line. “It was a way to keep up the morale. We each took a week.”
The worst moment, he said, was when representatives from two agencies came to inspect the shop and disagreed about the legality of a circular staircase. They walked out telling him that he “would have to figure it out.”
“At that point, we actually thought about just going to the U.K. with this,” he said. “One of the inspectors knew about new legislation. The other didn’t. And they just refused to come up with a solution.”
At one point, the company got a huge order from Denmark, he said. But the paperwork for what amounted to a wholesale transaction was so onerous that they decided not to even try to fill the order.
In contrast, he said, getting approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration to export his products to the United States took about 24 hours. “It was all online,” he said. “Nothing could be done online in Greece.”
Even so, Mr. Antonopoulos said that his story did eventually have a happy ending. His company, up and running for just five months, has already shipped goods to the United States, Argentina, Australia, Japan and even Mongolia, and it is covering its costs.
“Stool samples cannot be the center of this story,” Mr. Antonopoulos said. “We made it.”
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