He opened his first store in the Evangelistria area of Piraeus, and his business was brisk right from the beginning. But ten years after its inception, the bombs that befell Piraeus during WWII, made it necessary for the business to relocate to the very center of Athens: in Omonia Square at Kotopouli street. STANI has been operating in that same area since 1949. The new store was appreciated soon by Athenians and the first successes were not long in coming. In 1953 STANI received a certificate of authenticity and a gold medal from the International Exhibition in Thessaloniki for its yogurt made of sheep milk, and a little later a patent for the same product.
Today STANI is being operated by the same founding family and is a favorite spot for Athenians, as it has been for the past 78 years. Specifically STANIS' customers are Athenians and inhabitants of the wider district of Attica in general, as well as visitors to the city from all over Greece, who often claim: " If I go to Athens, without paying a visit to STANI for yogurt and 'loukoumades', I feel as if I missed something". Moreover, thousands of foreign tourists and professionals visiting the city were happy to indulge themselves in our line of dairy products, after they had been initially acquainted with STANI through news media reports abroad.
We, the people working at STANI, hope that every consumer embraces traditional products, and includes them in their diet, because they are associated with good health, and are part of our history and culture. It might thus be ill-advised to bypass them in favor of industrial products, which are made of ingredients known only to professionals schooled in chemistry.
The history of Stani, started off about 80 years ago from the village Athanassios Diakos, birthplace of the hero of the 1821 revolution, in the district of Fokida. This is also the birthplace of the most important, export-oriented, milk industrialists in Greece (e.g. Daskalopoulos of DELTA, Filippou of FAGE). This was the home village of Nikolaos Karageorgou, founder of STANI, who left for Piraeus in 1931 in order to open a business whose sole mission has been ever since to produce the best dairy products in Greece, an activity Nikolaos Karagiorgos knew better than any other.
"Uncle Nikos" knew empirically what we know about yogurt from the rich bibliography on the subject, and it is yogurt that was the core product on which the business was based.In 2005, STANI was totally revamped and modernized, in tandem with stricter health regulations, maintaining however the character of a traditional dairy-products patisserie.
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10 M. Kotopouli str.,
Omonia,
Athens, Greece.
Tel: +30 210 52.33.637, +30 210 52.27.451
e-mail: stani@stani1931.gr