Evi and Yannis Prodromou: From Selling Fruit to Funding Alzheimer's Research
Yannis Prodromou inherited his love of olive farming from his own father, Nikos, who first planted the family’s Halkidiki variety trees in Nea Potidaia. For most of their working lives, Yannis and his wife Evi were olive farmers in the traditional sense — growing olives and selling the fresh fruit to larger companies, the way farming families in the region had done for generations. In 2012, at the height of the Greek economic crisis, the couple made a deliberate decision to do something different: rather than keep selling raw olives for whatever price the big buyers offered, they’d press, bottle, and sell their own oil, and build a brand around the quality they knew their specific trees could produce.
What makes their story genuinely distinctive is what came next. Evi Prodromou’s own father died of Alzheimer’s disease — an experience she’s spoken about directly and personally in interviews about the company. “We all lived through this awful illness,” she’s said. “So we wanted to do whatever we could to help prevent this disease.” That’s not a marketing angle — it’s the actual, stated reason Yanni’s Olive Grove became the founding sponsor of MICOIL, donating four tons of their own high-phenolic oil (about a fifth of their total yearly production) to fund a two-year clinical study into whether early-harvest, high-phenolic olive oil could help patients with mild cognitive impairment avoid progressing to Alzheimer’s.
