After five years in the Colonnade shopping center on Eisenhower, Stamatopoulos & Sons Olive Oil has left its brick-and-mortar home.
“We really liked our time at the Colonnade,” says owner Greg Stamatopoulos, “but it wasn’t the best plan of action looking toward the future … Our time there was up, and we had a decision to make as far as continuing to go with the retail or putting more effort into selling online and to other stores, etcetera.”
Customers will still be able to get oil from the Stamatopoulos family’s farms in Greece on the company’s website, from Amazon, and at local specialty stores including Argus Farm Stop, Morgan & York, and Tippins Market. And Stamatopoulos is sticking around the area. “We had anticipated that [store] being our showroom and also a place where we could store our olive oil, but we’d actually underestimated how much we needed to keep on hand,” he says. “We were always kind of scrambling trying to find places to store” the oil. He’s solved that problem by buying a farm in Lodi Township, where he’ll also grow produce for the two restaurants he runs, the Barred Rock Cafe in Dexter and the City Limits Diner in Tecumseh. He says he expects to open a walk-in store at the farm at some point in the future.
In the meantime, he’s working to hang onto his retail customers. His website and phone-ordering service offers free delivery of olive oil and other Greek specialties like olives, vinegar, tea, and spices throughout Ann Arbor. Customers can use the discount code “Ann Arbor” to get 15 percent off all their online orders.
Stamatopoulos & Sons Olive Oil, online only. 369-2995. Daily 9 a.m.-9 p.m. stamsons.com
