The Tale of a “National Product”

This chapter follows the sociotechnical evolution of Greece’s olive/olive oil sector across four transitions and the path dependencies they produced. Early modernization centered groves and mills on basic chemical acidity-focused grading and bulk export routines. Between 1976 and the mid-1990s an architectural shift to olive groves’ expansion and intensification, along with the introduction of centrifugation decanters, reconfigured production, extraction, and waste streams, locking in infrastructure, management practices, and finance, while the bulk model endured. From the 1990s, EU standards and safety and environmental concerns redefined “quality” through panel tests, traceability, and certification, recentering authority with regulators, processors, and certifiers. Since 2010, sustainability has been reframed through health, locality, and biodiversity lenses: European Food Safety Authority’s health claim (432/2012), laboratory analytics (phenolic metrics, fingerprinting), and geographical indications (PDO/PGI) enabled new valuation practices and premiums, fostering producer-lab coalitions but also early diagnostic, methodological, and market lock-ins. We show how two partially competing configurations (phenolic/health claim and terroir/PDO) co-exist and interweave, co-producing value while unevenly distributing benefits, and discuss the implications for an emerging transition that appears substantively transformative through niche innovations.