Everything without animal products: The Rewe Group has opened a completely vegan supermarket in the trendy Berlin district of Friedrichshain. Can the concept work?
Hummus and vegan curd spreads, meatless sausages, eggnog, baking mixes, hygiene products, berry smoothies: everything vegan and all in one place. The special Rewe market in Berlin-Friedrichshain is about the size of a normal Rewe City in a train station lobby and is exclusively stocked with vegan products.
“It’s nice for customers who live a purely plant-based lifestyle because they no longer have to turn anything around, they no longer have to check anything,” says Rewe project manager Isabell Kroll, explaining the concept. She developed the vegan market for Rewe.
Isabell Kroll developed the concept for the market
Market is a test balloon for the Rewe Group
It is an experiment that the Rewe Group is launching on Warschauer Straße in Berlin-Friedrichshain, a trendy residential and nightlife area with a young, international audience. The goal: to try out new vegan products and, in addition to vegans, to specifically address the growing potential of flexitarians. Non-vegans are increasingly trying out meat, egg and milk substitute products.
Customer Olaf Hennig, for example. He’s concerned about an article about factory farming that he read yesterday: “Then I thought to myself, it’s actually high time you made the switch again. But then the next question was: What am I actually going to eat? There’s one “It’s obviously a great place because you can get inspiration there.”
A great market potential that Rewe now apparently wants to exploit even more specifically, says Kroll: “We have understood that purely plant-based nutrition is not just a trend – it is a way of life. More and more customers are living vegan. There are more and more interested customer groups, not “Only the pure vegans, but also flexitarians, vegetarians and so on. We want to see how we can develop further here.”
Survey shows great potential
According to the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy, 1.5 million people in Germany live vegan lives. In a survey by the market research institute GfK on behalf of Rewe, almost 27 percent of the approximately 1,000 respondents stated that they replace animal products with alternatives several times a week. According to the GfK survey, 54 percent of people choose vegan products out of curiosity.
But would the vegan newcomers therefore head straight for a completely vegan market? Whether the market will be accepted by customers is also a crystal ball for Rewe, admits project manager Kroll.
Especially since the Berlin company Veganz had been running a vegan supermarket at the same location for a few years. The store will disappear at the end of 2023 – like all of the other Veganz branches in Europe, which were temporarily ten. The company has changed its business model and is now primarily active as a manufacturer of vegan substitute products, which are also available in the new purely plant-based Rewe market.
Rewe, Veganz, Billa Plantilla
Berlin Rewe customer Markus Lange still knows the old Veganz supermarket and can appreciate the prices of Rewe’s vegan successor: “Veganz has had many specialty products. My impression is that there are also standard products here, not the super hip chips with anything else, but the standard chips that I also get in the supermarket. But I don’t have to search here: Which ones are now vegan?”
According to Rewe, the range of 2,700 vegan products here is almost twice as large as in conventional branches. These also include many cheaper brands such as the salad bag from Rewe’s own brand “Ja!” in the refrigerator shelf. A concept that customer Iden Biton can only imagine in Berlin. In Munich, she estimates, that wouldn’t work. The offer is well sorted and clear. “But a lot of it is also available in the normal Rewe. So you don’t actually have to come here.”
Interior view of the vegan Rewe market
The Rewe Group in Vienna has discovered that a purely vegan supermarket can work, says Berlin project manager Kroll. Food retailer Billa, which belongs to the Rewe Group, opened a purely plant-based branch, “Billa Plantilla”, in addition to a conventional Billa branch. Flexitarians could get inspiration in the purely vegan shop and still get sausage and cheese in the “normal Billa” next door.
Other purely vegan markets possible
In Berlin, the nearest conventional Rewe supermarket is 500 meters away, says Kroll. “That’s why it was a completely different matter for us to develop our own market.” The purely plant-based Rewe is “a test market, a venture, a laboratory for the future,” said Kroll. “We’ll just see how it goes now.” Rewe wants to “try out a lot” here and offer new items and brands. “We will decide in a few months whether there will be other markets like this.”
The competition will be watching closely. Lidl, Aldi and Edeka said when asked tagesschau.dethat they are currently not planning any purely vegan markets. Lidl points out that its vegan substitute products are deliberately placed in the immediate vicinity of their animal counterparts in order to enable a conscious purchasing decision. That’s why we don’t see any need to open a vegan branch at the moment.