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of organic products”, explains Lukas Nossol, Head of Marketing / Corporate Communications at Dennree.
Retail matters
The pandemic is also bringing the services of everyone involved in retail into the limelight – they’re relevant to the system.
Nossol describes the situation in the market: “2020 posed major chal- lenges for food retail. The biggest one was the temporary peak loads on intralogistics as a result of heavy nati- onwide demand for products to meet daily needs. Of course all the rules to reduce the risk of infection at our natural foods markets were also un- familiar. Yet we overcame both chal- lenges quickly and effectively thanks to close collaboration with our long- standing partners and suppliers, and at the shops, and thanks to our em- ployees’ dedication.”
Kaiser at Bio Company had a similar experience: “With commitment and team spirit, we overcame the challen- ges quite well. By now we’ve made it all routine. It’s true that we’ve seen high- er revenues during the waves. But on the other hand we’ve also had higher costs for things like personnel, instal- ling Plexiglas barriers, setting up disin- fectant dispensers, providing nose and mouth masks for our employees, and a lot more.”
Pandemic gives a lift to demand for organics worldwide
Amarjit Sahota, an international ex- pert on the organic products market and the founder of Organic Monitor market researchers, now Ecovia Intel- ligence, of London, speaks of a “co- ronavirus boost for the global organic industry”.
From India to Europe and to the USA, the pandemic has brought wholesalers and retailers a surge of up to 40% in de- mand from last year.
Most of all, online business is boo- ming so vigorously that Amazon, owner of organic foods giant Whole Foods, has now had to limit online or- ganic food sales in the USA so that it can meet the enormous demand, Sa- hota reports. The new health aware-
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BioFach is the perfect opportunity to enter the world of organic products and taste, and for meeting organic producers from the organic market, and to be inspired by the sector’s latest trends.
ness has had two major effects. Con- sumers around the world are turning more and more to organic products. Hoarding during the uncertain time of the first lockdown led to empty shel- ves and restocking problems for some groups of goods, including in German natural foods retailing. The situation has now calmed, and logistics is wor- king properly again even for goods from other European countries and overseas.
Outlook: The international organics industry will continue to profit
Sahota takes a look back on the evo- lution of the organic market: organic foods were first introduced on a large scale in the early 1990s. It took more than 15 years until worldwide revenues from organic products reached about 50 billion US dollars in 2008. Within another ten years (2018), revenues passed 100 billion dollars.
Since Covid-19 is changing the way we shop and eat, the next leap to 150 billion dollars might arrive within the next 5 years, Sahota predicts. But cer- tain conditions will be important to en- sure that the organic sector’s growth is fair for everyone.
The groundwork has been laid, as Lu- kas Nossol also emphasizes, “While glo-
EVENTS
balised commodity channels are hard to manage, partly because one doesn’t know some of the suppliers any more, the organic sector is well networked. Specialty retailers know who they’re working with, they’re people they can talk to and work out solutions with. So we’re looking with confidence toward the upcoming year 2021.”
Balance disrupted between supplier countries and selling markets
Yet it’s also true that the “internatio- nal supplier network is under pressure”, Sahota admits. He explains the connec- tion: many of the raw ingredients that are used by European and North Ame- rican organic food companies come from Asia, Africa and Latin America. National lockdowns and uncertainties in managing the pandemic first inter- rupted many supply chains.
Because of the pandemic, small or- ganic farmers could no longer bring in some or all of their harvests, or could not export them. They are once again the people to suffer from a crisis. Take India as an example: the country is the source of organic tea, herbs, spices and other important organic ingredients. At the same time, the subcontinent is among the world’s regions most se- verely affected by Covid-19.
Transformation: Changing our lifestyle
Prince Felix of Löwenstein, an orga- nic farmer and long-standing Chairman of the BÖLW, the German Federation of Organic Food Producers – which is also a national supporting organization of BIOFACH – explains that one crucial factor for bringing about the ecological transformation will be to link the vari- ous transformation movements toge- ther in such a way that they can work creatively and reinforce one another in the same direction.
In that regard, climate protection is one of the top priorities: “Land use has a considerable influence on our economy’s impact on the climate, which all the more goes to show how important it is to lend active support to the climate protection movement, and to take every possible step to reduce CO2 emissions”, he says.
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