Kalamata Olive Oil: The Olive, the City and the PDO

To a UK shopper, Kalamata means an olive — the dark, almond-shaped one in a Greek salad. On the GB register of protected food and drink names it means two things, neither of them casual: a protected designation of origin for the table olive, and a second, entirely separate PDO in the oils and fats class for extra virgin olive oil — and the olive in the jar is not even the variety the oil is pressed from. This guide untangles the name: the city it belongs to, the two protected entries, the two different olives behind them, and what the oil’s PDO does and does not guarantee on a label.

Kalamata olive oil, where the name is used as the law reserves it, is extra virgin olive oil pressed within Messenia in the south-west Peloponnese, overwhelmingly from the Koroneiki olive, and certified under the “Καλαμάτα / Kalamata” protected designation of origin.

Plate I · IllustrationRecord

Is Kalamata an olive, a city or an oil?

All three, which is exactly the trouble. Kalamata is first a city: the capital of Messenia, the south-western peninsula of the Peloponnese, sitting at the head of the Messenian Gulf. The olive named after the city is the Kalamon variety — plump, dark purple, almond-shaped, harvested for brining, the fruit the world simply calls the Kalamata olive and drops into a Greek salad. The oil that carries the city’s name is something else again. Messenia’s oil groves are dominated not by Kalamon but by Koroneiki — a small, oil-rich variety whose name is usually traced to Koroni, a town on Messenia’s south-east coast. Kalamon is grown for the jar; Koroneiki is grown for the press.

Fig. I · One city, two treesDiagram

Kalamata — an olive, a city or an oil? All three.

The city

Kalamata

Capital of Messenia, the south-western peninsula of the Peloponnese, at the head of the Messenian Gulf. Both products below carry its name.

The jar — the table olive

“Kalamata olives”

The Kalamon variety — plump, dark purple, almond-shaped, harvested for brining; the fruit the world simply calls the Kalamata olive.

The treeKalamon — named after the city. Grown for the jar.

The press — the oil

“Kalamata olive oil”

Extra virgin olive oil pressed within Messenia — overwhelmingly from the Koroneiki olive, not the Kalamon.

The treeKoroneiki — its name usually traced to Koroni, a town on Messenia’s south-east coast. Grown for the press.

The olive in the jar is not the variety the oil is pressed from — the two products share a city, not a tree.

So “Kalamata olives” and “Kalamata olive oil” share a city and very little else. Most shoppers treat them as one subject. The law does not — it keeps them on separate lines of the register.

Why are there two protected Kalamata names?

Because Greece registered each product on its own terms under the EU scheme, and both entries were carried onto the GB register — the searchable list of protected names that Defra publishes — on 31 December 2020, when the UK set up its own scheme after leaving the EU. Side by side:

Both entries hold “Registered” status on the GB register today. One limit worth knowing: the register itself does not publish either product specification — the entries direct enquiries to Defra — so the register substantiates the name, its class and its status, and the specification detail lives a request away. The same is true of the Greek honey PDOs, a parallel we walked through in how to judge a jar of honey.

What does the Kalamata olive oil PDO require?

A PDO — protected designation of origin — reserves a name for a product from a defined zone, made to a written specification, and certified by a control system; for Greek PDOs the oil is certified under the scheme’s controls. The name on the label is the visible end of a paper trail, not a flavour description.

Two parts of the Kalamata oil specification are worth stating precisely, because both are published in the EU documents behind the entry. First, the varieties: the oil must come mainly from Koroneiki, with at most 5% from the Mastoeidis variety. Second, the zone: the designated area is the administrative boundaries of Messenia. That zone is wider than it once was — the original 1997 registration covered the old province of Kalamata, and a non-minor amendment approved by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2015/1393, in August 2015, extended the designation across Messenia as a whole. It is that amended, Messenia-wide specification which stood when the entry was carried onto the GB register at the end of 2020.

Fig. II · The zone, three datesDiagram

What the registered name covered, and when

1. 13 June 1997

   EU registration

   The original registration covered the old province of Kalamata.

2. August 2015

   Non-minor amendment — Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2015/1393

   The designation extended across Messenia as a whole — the administrative boundaries of Messenia, a zone wider than the city.

3. 31 December 2020

   Carried onto the GB register

   It is that amended, Messenia-wide specification which stood when the entry was carried onto the GB register.

The zone is wider than it once was: a bottle answers to the administrative boundaries of Messenia, not to the old province the 1997 registration named.

Beyond variety and zone, a specification of this kind governs the things a name cannot otherwise vouch for: how the groves are cultivated, how quickly and at what temperature the fruit is milled, quality limits the oil must meet — typically tighter than the base legal grade — and which body checks all of it. We state here only what we verified in the published documents; the full specification is Defra’s or the Greek registry’s to provide. The point for a buyer is simpler: PDO is not a mood. An oil either is certified under the scheme or it is not, and the producer can show which.

What does a PDO protect against in Great Britain?

More than copying. Under assimilated Regulation (EU) No 1151/2012, article 13, a registered name is protected against any direct or indirect commercial use on products not covered by the registration — and, further, against “any misuse, imitation or evocation, even if the true origin of the products or services is indicated”, including where the protected name is translated or accompanied by wording such as “style” or “type”. Evocation — wording that merely calls the protected name to mind — is the part with teeth: an oil pressed outside the scheme cannot be sold in Great Britain as “Kalamata-style” or “Kalamata type”, however honest its back label is about where it actually comes from. Registered names also cannot become generic here. The register is the rare place in food marketing where a one-minute check settles a claim outright: a bottle either carries a name on the register or it does not.

What kind of oil country is Messenia?

The kind the variety map predicts. Messenia is the Peloponnese’s south-western peninsula, with the Taygetos range rising to its east, the Messenian Gulf below Kalamata, and a long, mild coastal belt — wet winters, hot dry summers — running down to Koroni and the west coast. Olive growing runs from the coastal plain up into the hill country. The harvest follows the Mediterranean rhythm: olives are picked from October into winter, earlier for greener, more pungent oil and later for riper, softer oil — the trade-off our early-harvest olive oil guide takes apart.

How do you buy Kalamata olive oil?

The PDO settles the name; it does not excuse the rest of the label. Three checks, in order:

• The name, exactly. “Καλαμάτα / Kalamata” as a designation of origin on the front, on a bottle whose producer can point to certification under the scheme’s controls. Wording that circles the name — “Kalamata region”, “Kalamata-style” — on an uncertified oil is not a weaker version of the claim; it is the thing the register prohibits.
• The grade, which is the same everywhere. Extra virgin is defined by limits that bind every bottle sold in Great Britain, PDO or not: free acidity of at most 0.8%, peroxide value of at most 20 mEq O₂/kg, the UV absorbency ceilings (K232 at most 2.50, K268 at most 0.22, Delta-K at most 0.01), and a taste-panel result with a median of defects of zero and a fruity median above zero. A protected name does not raise these bars; the bottle still has to clear them.
• The freshness signals. A harvest year may be printed only where all the oil in the container comes from a single year’s crop, so a bottle that names one is telling you something checkable. “Cold extraction” is a regulated phrase — oil obtained below 27°C by percolation or centrifugation — and “first cold pressing” is reserved for oils from traditional hydraulic presses; the difference, and why almost no modern mill can print the second, is in cold-pressed olive oil. And a printed acidity figure is lawful only alongside the peroxide, wax and UV figures in the same field of vision — a lone “0.3% acidity” boast is a labelling foul, not a credential.

The full walk across a bottle — mandatory wording, origin lines, the optional extras and what each is worth — is in how to read an olive oil label, and the wider buying method in best olive oil UK.

Can olives grown outside Messenia be called Kalamata?

This is the olive-aisle version of the question, and its answer was contested for years. The Kalamon variety is grown far beyond Messenia — across Greece, and as far afield as the United States and Australia — and growers outside the protected zone have long argued that Kalamata names the variety, not only the PDO. In 2024 Greece’s Council of State ruled that the two can lawfully coexist: the variety name may be used by growers elsewhere, while the Ελιά Καλαμάτας / Elia Kalamatas PDO stays exclusive to table olives from the designated zone. So the word on a jar can be weaker than the word on the register — “Kalamata olives” may tell you only the variety, and it is the PDO name that certifies Messenian origin. The oil is the cleaner case: on a bottle sold in Great Britain, Kalamata is a protected oils-and-fats name, and an oil trading on it from outside the scheme is what the evocation rule above exists to stop.

Does the name make it better oil?

It makes it accountable oil. A PDO guarantees where the oil is from, which olives it was pressed from, and that somebody certified both against a specification — real guarantees, and rare ones on a supermarket shelf. What it cannot guarantee is that the particular bottle in your hand is at its best: extra virgin’s legal limits are identical for every oil sold here, and the differences that decide a bottle — harvest timing, milling speed, storage, time since pressing — move within the PDO exactly as they move outside it. A fresh, well-made oil with no protected name can outclass a tired bottle with one. Composition questions sit alongside this: what the phenolic content of an oil measures, and how harvest timing moves it, is at olive oil polyphenols. And whether olive oil deserves its wider reputation is a research question, which we read trial by trial in is olive oil good for you.

Where does THYMELIA stand?

THYMELIA is a UK house for Cretan thyme honey and bee products, and this page is part of a second world we are building the same way as the first: olive oil, taught from the register and the regulations before anything is sold. We have no shop and no bottle on sale — so nothing on this page is a claim about oil of ours, and no oil of ours is Kalamata PDO until a certificate says so. Organic certification and this designation are different things: our oil is certified organic, which says nothing whatever about the latter. What we can commit to is the method the honey side already runs at testing: when a bottle exists, its label will have to survive exactly the checks this guide teaches, with the paperwork published. Until then, the honest work is the untangling — and the name on the register belongs to the people of Messenia who earned it.