Germany’s First Waste-Free Supermarket Sells Groceries Without The Packaging

A brainchild of Sara Wolf and Miena Glimbovski, Original Unverpackt (Originally Unpackaged) is Germany’s first package-free supermarket that sources food products largely from local suppliers – to reduce transportation costs and pollution; keeps food items in large dispenser bins – to allow customers to decide how much they need to take home; and sells mostly organic goods (about 80%) in reusable containers or bags made from recycled paper – to limit municipal waste caused by plastic food packaging.

“Here, the customer only takes what they need. We’d like to offer an alternative way of shopping – one where we offer everything you need but you won’t find hundreds of different types of body lotion or olive oil,” Wolf and Glimbovski told The Guardian.

At Original Unverpackt, customers bring their own containers, get them weighed and labeled by the staff, buy food directly from the bins, and at the hill, pay for the net weight of their groceries post deduction of the weight of their containers. While vodka is stored in a big demijohn from which customers can buy a few shots, for beer and red wine buyers get their own bottles to take as much or as little as they like.

“Original Unverpackt’s mission is all about forward thinking, by encouraging ‘precycling’, a preventive form of environmentalism, as opposed to just recycling already used packaging,” Wolf told The Daily Mail. “It was important to act and to be part of the solution instead of just getting worked up about the predicted end of the world,” added Glimbovski.

Still In Berlin reports:

Buying your groceries waste-free means some planning, for sure. You have to bring re-usable bags and containers – OU has a huge selection of glass jars, cotton bags, metal boxes and bottles to establish your waste-free life; but you can obviously re-use things you have at home – think about the dust bags one receives when buying shoes or bags, unused pillowcases for bread and vegetables, empty jam or pickle jars… browse your stock before buying new! (An obviously essential approach to creating less waste is to re-use instead of buying new.)

Everything at OU is organic and sold in bulk, which means you just take as much as you need, fill it in your own bags and jars, whose weight will be subtracted at the cashier, and pay only the produce. Which also means the price per kilo is lower than the average – did you notice that in a conventional supermarket the price per kilo drops with the size of the package? OU obviously only has one price per kilo, regardless of whether you buy 200g or 2000g. Especially more expensive things like superfoods are considerably less pricey in here – with the average price tag being the same as in any other organic food store.

A French lady who lives in Berlin had been waiting for this kind of a store to open, She told NPR:

“I have been shopping in the organic stores for the last 7 years and couldn’t understand, why there is always so much packaging and waste. I thought that packaging food also makes it more expensive to the customer. Also, the idea is fun – I just bought a bottle of lotion and shampoo and I think it would be fun to come back and refill. I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time.”

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