Today we’d like to introduce you to Eleftheria.
Hi Eleftheria, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I always laugh a little when people ask me this, because I never sat down one day and said “I’m going to build a tea company.” It happened out of a real feeling.
I grew up just outside Athens, in a village where herbs were part of normal life. if someone had a cold, you boiled mountain tea before you thought of anything else. I didn’t realize how much that shaped me until I moved to the States in 2020. The homesickness hit me in small ways, mostly in the kitchen. I couldn’t find the herbs I grew up with, and the ones I did find tasted like nothing. At some point I thought, if I miss this so much, other people must miss it too. That’s how Greek Superherbs started.
For a long time it was just me, blending, packing, answering every email, with my four-legged daughter Blue as my only coworker. Slowly it grew. Today we’re based in New York, we’ve added honey from Ikaria and, this year, saffron from Kozani, and a family back in Greece helps me with the packing now. It’s still small, and I like it that way because it lets me stay close to every step.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Smooth? No, and I think anyone who imports food from another country knows exactly what I mean.
The biggest ongoing challenge is logistics. My herbs come from Greece, so everything has to cross an ocean before it reaches a single customer. Customs paperwork, freight costs, shipments stuck at the air(port). I’ve learned things about import regulations I never imagined I’d need to know. And even once products are here, fulfillment can go wrong in ways you don’t control. I’ve had moments where orders were sitting somewhere in the system, customers were emailing me asking “where’s my order?”, and I was just trying to figure it out myself, without having any real control over it. All you can do is make phone calls, stay polite, and keep your customers informed while feeling anything but calm inside.
Another struggle was doing everything alone for so long. When you’re a one-person company, there’s no one to hand things to. If the website breaks, that’s you. If fifty orders come in at once, that’s also you. The marketing, the photos, the emails, the accounting, the packing, all of it. And it’s not just the workload, it’s the decisions. Every day you’re choosing between ten things that all feel urgent, with no one to ask “what do you think?” You learn to trust yourself, but you also learn how lonely that trust can feel at midnight when you’re still printing shipping labels. Looking back, those years taught me every corner of my company, and that’s something no one can take from me.
And one thing that made me genuinely disappointed: I can’t get certified as a woman-owned business because I’m an immigrant. A lawful one, who lives here, works here, and pays taxes here. And I can’t get certified as a small business either. So I’m a woman with a small business who can’t be certified as either. It’s a strange feeling to build something with your own hands and be told you don’t quite count.
But every struggle taught me something, and honestly, the hard parts are why I trust the business now. It’s been tested.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Greek Superherbs is exactly what it sounds like: the best herbs of Greece, brought here the way they’re meant to be. We make loose leaf herbal tea blends from wild herbs that grow on Mount Olympus, in Crete, in Ikaria and in Grevena. They are wild and organic, picked by hand and dried slowly in the shade the way people have done it for generations. We also have raw honey from Ikaria, the Greek island famous for its people living past 100, and this year we added PDO saffron from Kozani, which is considered one of the finest in the world.
What sets us apart is honestly very simple: we don’t cut corners. Everything is certified organic, nothing is artificial, and even our packaging is home compostable. Each blend was created around a real need in daily life, things like sleep, stress, energy and immunity, and I spent a long time studying the science behind these herbs before I ever sold a single pouch. I know where every herb comes from, and that’s not a marketing phrase, I actually know.
What I’m most proud of is the trust. We have over a thousand five-star reviews, and the messages behind them mean more to me than any number. People write to tell me a blend became part of their evening routine, or that the smell reminded them of their grandmother’s village in Greece. When a Greek person tells me my tea tastes like home, that’s the highest compliment I can get, because they know exactly what the real thing tastes like.
What I’d want your readers to know is this: these herbs have been part of everyday life in Greece for thousands of years, not as a trend but as a way of living. I didn’t invent anything. I just brought it across the ocean, with a lot of care, so you can make it part of your life too.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
Most people who follow Greek Superherbs picture me somewhere on a Greek island, drying herbs in the sun. The surprising truth is that I run this business from New York. I built a Greek brand an ocean away from Greece, and honestly, the distance is part of why it exists. When you live far from home, you notice what you miss. For me it wasn’t the beaches (yes, ok, I also miss the beaches), it was the smells; mountain tea on the stove, oregano in my hands, the herbs my family always had in the cupboard. Greek Superherbs started as my way of closing that distance, first for myself, then for anyone else who wanted a piece of it.
So the brand really lives in two countries. The herbs grow and are gathered in Greece, and a farming family there helps me pack every order with their own hands. Then everything crosses the ocean to my customers here. I’m lucky enough to visit Greece two or three times a year — to see my family and friends, but also to forage myself and oversee the whole process with my own eyes. People are often surprised there’s no big warehouse operation behind it, no team of twenty. It’s me, my laptop, a few trips a year to the mountains, and this family in Greece I trust completely. I’ve had to learn customs paperwork, freight, and things I never imagined when I started, but I wouldn’t trade this setup for anything, because every package still passes through hands that care.
Living abroad made me more Greek, not less. I’m stricter about authenticity than I ever was back home, because now I know exactly what it feels like to want the real thing and not be able to find it. And a small last one: my name, Eleftheria, means “freedom” in Greek. Starting this business is the most free I’ve ever felt, so I like to think I grew into my name.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://greeksuperherbs.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/greeksuperherbs/?hl=en
