Many Retailers Are Saying Goodbye to Unpackaged

According to an NIQ/GfK survey in January, around 70 percent of Germans would like to buy more products without packaging. There are plenty of opportunities to do so:
after the opening of the first pure unpackaged store in Germany in 2014, established food retailers have followed suit with filling stations on their premises.

The topic is currently experiencing fresh momentum thanks to test projects at Rewe and dm.  The drugstore retailer dm has been selling twelve different items in 15 stores in Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony for two months. The pilot project is planned to run for one year.

Both retailers are promoting products from their own organic brands from the dry range such as pasta and cereals. And both are relying on the system by the Czech start-up Miwa. The advantage over the usual solutions on the market: there is no need to refill the containers in the store. The supplier fills the containers, and they are hung directly in the stations in the store. Rewe launched the project in November in eleven, mainly independently operated stores between Cologne, Bonn, and Aachen. The pilot project was originally due to be completed in May, but “due to the complexity of the implementation, it will be delayed.”

Apart from the two prominent projects, the results are sobering, as the Lebensmittelzeitung reports. The number of unpackaged stores fell significantly in 2023. In food retail, the picture is mixed: while some retailers, such as E-Center Herkules in Bad Vilbel near Frankfurt am Main, are sticking to their unpackaged stations or even expanding them, many retailers are excluding such stations, especially when opening new stores.

Others are reducing or completely discontinuing the offer. The reason is the significant slump in sales due to the coronavirus pandemic, merchants told LZ. They mostly rely on the Eco-Terra system, in which the retailer cleans and refills the containers – like Tegut, Edeka Haas, and Edeka Rees.

Having started out ambitiously in 2020, retailer Tobias Haas has gradually reduced the width of his unpackaged shelf in his store in St. Georgen near Villingen-Schwenningen from three to one meter. The goods have been varied time and again, with confectionery and baked goods added, but to no avail.

Edeka Haas now wants to replace the station with a bakery store. At Edeka Rees, only the one in the Freiburg-St. Georgen store is left of the original seven tapping stations due to marginal sales is all that remains. However, store manager Marius Rees wants to hold on to it.

Tegut also Reduces Unpackaged Articles

Tegut is also rowing back. The Migros subsidiary, which opened its first unpackaged station in its pilot store in Fulda-Kaiserwiesen in 2019, is reducing its stores with stations from 40 to 25 across Germany. And that’s not all: “We are reducing the number of items from around 140 to 90 and making the stations more compact and narrower,” explains Ralf Trappberger, Dry Goods Buyer at Tegut. The larger station in the Fulda pilot store is also being adapted: from over eleven to five meters wide. The high workload for disinfection and restocking cannot be underestimated, says Trappberger.

“Like other marketing measures, an unpackaged station can have a positive effect on the rest of the range of services and products on offer,” says Carsten Kortum from the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University. For Kortum, the loose goods are just a nice-to-have: “The existence of an unpackaged station is not an important criterion for the choice of shopping location.” The retail expert also sees the direct competition at the POS with cheaper packaged products as problematic. He speaks of a gap between consumers’ price expectations and purchasing behavior in terms of sustainability: “Customers actually want lower prices for unpackaged products, as there is no expensive packaging and they have to fill them themselves.” But they usually have to dig deeper into their pockets.