Local Importers Bring Home a World of Flavors

Photos by Michael Piazza

To get meta for a moment, this magazine typically celebrates local food, farms and the folks who cultivate them. This story is no different, though the victuals featured include Turkish pumpkins, lightly pickled and preserved; cheeses and butter made from the milk of Greek sheep; Nicaraguan coffee beans; Sicilian wines and olive oils; and robust honey from the forests of Greece. What unites these worldly goods are the people who bring them to Massachusetts: Local importers, often tapping family connections, are diversifying the shelves at some of our favorite places to shop.

“We tell people we’re a local company with roots in Turkey,” says Serdar Sinaci, cofounder of Koy Pantry, whose Woburn-based brand offers products that reflect the culinary diversity of the ancient region of Anatolia, from bulgur and red pepper paste to that pumpkin in syrup.

Sinaci, who moved to Watertown from Turkey when he was nine years old, is the former general manager of Ana Sortun’s bakery, Sofra; and was also a longtime buyer at Formaggio Kitchen. His Koy Pantry business partners, Baran Bolukbas and Seckim Arikam, are childhood friends from Istanbul. Bolukbas, a chef, has lived in the Allston-Brighton area for five years and worked for Sortun at both Sofra and Oleana. Arikam remains in Turkey doing business development.

The products they are importing—which also include preserved figs, tomato paste and an earthy-sweet pistachio spread made in the UNESCO-designated gastronomic city of Gaziantep—represent artisan-made versions of items that are relatively easy to find at the Middle Eastern markets of Sinaci’s hometown. But what’s typically available is mass-produced, Sinaci says. “For people that enjoy cooking and care about the ingredients they put into their body, we felt like there was a need for an artisanal approach,” he says.

Olive oil imports abound as well, but Olio Taibi has stood out for 20 years. That’s thanks to innovative ideas Giuseppe Taibi has brought to the table. An olive orchard in a village of Agrigento, Sicily, has been in Taibi’s family since 1867, though Taibi chose to become a software engineer, which brought him to Boston in the 1990s. But he didn’t want “to be the one to abandon this family tradition because I was pursuing more of a high-tech career,” he says.

When his father sent over fresh, bright olive oil from their orchard, Taibi shared it with friends in Boston, including Formaggio Kitchen founder and importing pioneer Ihsan Gurdal, who encouraged and assisted him to begin bringing it in commercially. Taibi was able to use his expertise with the still-fledgling internet to get the product into the right shops. He eventually signed on with a distributor, and today Olio Taibi is available throughout North America.

“I have been riding the various waves of technology from the web to the smartphone,” he says. With two teenage daughters now, “I see the struggle of this generation with keeping up with technology. I find solace in also having the ability to focus on the magic of the olive trees.”

Nikki Menounos Daigel agrees there’s “magic” that radiates through the culture of ancient places, such as the Arcadian mountain village where her family is from in Greece. She founded her ecommerce company, Portoula, as an attempt to bring some of that magic back to Boston. Portoula’s prized import, a trio of forest honeys collected in remote woods throughout the country, “comes from places that are not touched by humans,” she says.

The expert she works with in Greece is a family friend and fourth-generation beekeeper who practices traditional methods of apiculture, Daigel explains, such as nomadic beekeeping. The labor-intensive process, which involves moving hives throughout the season to optimize the conditions for the bees, is well worth the effort to produce distinctive honey that’s lower in sugar and moisture than more familiar blossom honey (which means it never crystallizes). Portoula just launched in December 2022, yet each of its honeys has already earned a Great Taste award from the Guild of Fine Food in London, the largest culinary accreditation program in the world.

Accolades are nice, says Antonio Bertone, whose startup Alileo recently earned a few from Decanter World Wine Awards. But like Portoula, Alileo exists to keep its American founder connected to his heritage. Bertone and his wife, Alexandra Drane, had long discussed creating a business like Alileo, a Gloucester-based importer of Sicilian boxed natural wines, but they activated the idea after Bertone’s mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness in 2020. She had been the only person from her family to emigrate to the U.S., and her son made a “promise that that connection back to Sicily wouldn’t die with her,” Bertone says.

His cousin, a career winemaker in Marsala, produces Alileo. “It’s a very working-class way of farming,” Bertone says. Employees like his cousin typically don’t get credit—let alone bonuses or stock options—for a winery’s success. “If you don’t have that last name” that’s on the label, Bertone says, “you just get a paycheck.” (For related reasons concerning his day job, the winemaker cousin prefers not to be named. Bertone says he hopes Alileo will be in a position to hire him fulltime— and give him all the credit he deserves—in 2024.)

Creating upward mobility for folks back home is the driving force behind Recreo Coffee, a roastery and café in West Roxbury with an outpost at Boston City Hall. Miriam Morales and her husband, Hector, imported their first lot of green coffee beans from Jinotega, Nicaragua, in 2011, with “the idea of helping my family survive,” Morales says. The farm from which Recreo sources all of its coffee has been in her family for 54 years. The price of the seeds is regulated on a global commodity exchange known as the C market, and there are “tough times” when it yields under $1 per pound, she explains. “They don’t get enough to survive the farm, let alone pay their workers well,” Morales says.

Today, Recreo is not only helping to sustain the farm, but also to reinvest in the area. More than 30 families of farmworkers live there and it employs dozens more seasonally. Along with providing housing and meals for the permanent workers, 30% of Recreo’s profits go toward initiatives to support them, including a health clinic, kids’ programming during harvest times and a girls’ mentoring program, Morales says.

“It’s a very rural area in a very poor country, so some people don’t go to school because they don’t have the means or even the encouragement,” Morales says. “Our passion is not to just grow this business; it’s really to make a difference.”

For Paul Hatziiliades, growing his imported foods company, Olympiana, is a way of slowing down. He was born in Boston to Greek immigrants, but now spends much of his time on his estate outside of Thessaloniki. “I’m a country boy at heart,” Hatziiliades says. The solar-powered property has an organic farm, olive grove and a vineyard, plus animals. Most of it is cultivated for personal use, but the milk from his 550 sheep contributes to making a variety of dairy products for Olympiana.

The company began in 2011 with olive oil and soon added white figs, preserved vegetables and cookies to its portfolio, all sourced directly from producers. But dairy has become its bread and butter. In 2014, Olympiana acquired a late family member’s artisan cheese production in northern Greece. “I’d have to have 10,000 sheep to produce all the milk that I need for our cheese,” Hatziiliades says. This year, the company will officially launch the Olympiana Creamery brand as well as its newest product, a super-rich sheep-milk butter.

When they visit, Hatziiliades can host his family at his estate. His 73-year-old father still works as a builder in Boston, though he studied agriculture at the American Farm School Thessaloniki before emigrating in the early 1970s to escape a dictatorship that was in power. “This is his dream, too.”

Owning a business, staying connected to family and the land, staying supplied with favorite foods—importing artisan products to Boston allows for the best of all worlds.

alileowines.com
extravirginfoods.com
koypantry.com
oliotaibi.com
portoula.com
recreocoffee.com

This story appeared in the Fall 2023 issue.