Tuesday the 9th of April, started with us taking the public bus to Agria, a beautiful coast town, we soaked in the sea sight and started our walk towards Epsa Soda and juice factory. We were welcomed by Eva, who took us to the museum where she told us all about the history of Epsa. Around 59 people work in this factory. Even though export and sales have risen they still stay in this region because they believe the water from Pelion makes the product unique. After asking about restrictions on water use, she said there were none.
The company tries to play the big trends and started selling bio products, products with less sugar and stevia instead. Right now the 100% juice ones are preferred.
It started out as an ice company for fridges. The old fridges used to be closets where ice would be put in on top and then everything was kept fresh. However even then they saw that lemons would rot. So one of the founders thought about just keeping the juice. That’s how the lemonade started. We saw the history of the bottles, the classic one is still the glass bottle with metal cap that they use. However they’ve started producing plastic bottles now. The environmentalist in me was quite disappointed. When asked about the impact of this product the answer was that it’s recyclable. Everyone knows though that recycling doesn’t really happen in Greece and is not the solution. On the glass bottles however they have a refund, so about 70 to 80% gets returned. The plastic bottles brought along two main advantages, it’s cheaper and you can fill about 90 000 bottles instead of 2000 glass ones in the same time. Asking about the waste management, she was very adamant there was almost no waste, since they recycle paper, plastic and have biological cleaning and natural gas. Asking further however she revealed that they work together with a cement company, put all the non recyclable trash in a cement cube, and drop it somewhere in the ocean. I’m still hoping this was a joke and not real, but I fear it is. Overall an interesting visit but we felt the company was greenwashing us and not telling the whole truth. I’m quite disappointed in how they handle trash and the environment here in this company and Greece in general.
We then took the bus back and walked half an hour to reach the Paprika vegetable storage. They sponsored the fruit we got on the exchange week! This is the place between the producers and the consumers where everything gets together and stored, to then be sent to the stores. We learned about the ways to store fruits and veggies, that they need to clean the filters of the fungus rooms a lot because of spores and that strawberries were the most difficult ones to store.
Right now they are trying to find ways to use the skin and pit of an avocado and they tried a German experiment where no separate rooms are used but every product is put in the same room. This experiment however failed here.
We had lunch and some free time aka nap time and headed over to the tsipouradiko for Tsipouro night! Now what is Tsipouro night? It’s a night where you order Tsipouro, a liquor around 45%, which turns white when you add water and has a strong anis taste, and get lots of sea food with your order. The more you drink, the more food you get! We tasted all of the local fish products and had lots of fun with our Greek and international friends. To try and talk instead of being on our phone we even made a tower of the phones in the middle of the table, so no one had access. Definitely a thing to try out sometime!
