PACKAGE-FREE SHOPPING: Hannah Sartin, would-be German retail grocer, shows the glass jars she hopes her customers will buy and constant refill with dry goods. If crowd-funders back her grocery, it will sell goods by weight and volume without packaging.


By Vanessa Vu

Entrepreneurs don’t just need a good idea, they need money. But where once they would have gone to the bank, thanks to the Internet, they now have another option.
A particularly tantalising source is crowd-funding, in which anyone can donate money via the Internet.
Hannah Sartin, a German, wants to open a packaging-free grocery store by the end of the year in Munich, trading on the revulsion among some Germans towards “unnecessary” wrapping and boxes. She is collecting capital for her idea over the Internet.
Instead of shrink-wrapped cucumbers and chocolate bars wrapped in foil and packed in little cardboard boxes, everything will be sold by weight or volume and dropped loose into the customers’ own reusable containers and bags.
Only sensitive products such as milk will be sold pre-packaged, in glass bottles that can be washed and refilled at the dairy.
Together with her husband Carlo, she started the project OHNE in March.
OHNE (the German word for “without”) stands for a life without rubbish, waste or pesticides.
She has chosen the districts of Maxvorstadt and Glockenbachviertel as her preferred locations for the supermarket and hopes to attract environmentally sensitive people who only have themselves to feed and normally buy food in tiny portions.
Sartin is not the only one to have had the idea. Similar shops have opened in the past year in four other German cities: Kiel, Bonn Berlin and Dresden.
“It’s the zeitgeist,” says Marie Delaperriere, owner of the Kiel shop Unverpackt (Unpackaged).
But it isn’t just the idea of an alternative way to shop that’s down to the zeitgeist.
Like Sartin, the shops in Berlin and Dresden also used alternative finance methods to get started.
Sartin is hoping to collect 55,000 euros (62,000 dollars) by the end of June in order to pay the first rent instalment, buy shelves and fill them with muesli, flour and oil. At last check, she had already got around a fifth of the sum.
But according to Karsten Wenzlauf, director of the German Crowd-funding Association DCV, the concept of group financing is nothing new.
Even in the Middle Ages there were different forms of it, he says.
“The internet has made the payment model quicker and more transparent,” says Wenzlauf.
A study by Cambridge University discovered that 236 million euros had been collected via crowd-funding in Germany alone over the past three years, with more than half of that figure gathered in 2014.
The German figures will climb to 359 million euros a year by 2020, according to the Swiss University of St Gallen.
Instead of relying on one investor, business risks are spread out among a larger number of small investors.
And by contributing just a few euros, they feel as if they belong to a larger whole.
Instead of profits, investors are often given small presents. At OHNE, they will come in the form of cotton tote bags, vouchers or invitations to opening launches.
But Wenzlaff doubts that crowd-funding can replace the traditional banking system. Rather, crowd-funding is an additional option, useful to test the waters for new ideas and advertise them at the same time.
”If the packaging-free supermarket had just opened in Berlin, it’s probable that not as many people would have noticed,” says Wenzlaff.
That shop, Original Unverpackt (Originally Unpackaged), in the trendy Kreuzberg district, has already become a tourist attraction according to the daily Berliner Zeitung.
Sartin has also received a lot of interested messages via her crowdfunding page.
Some supporters have for example sent her pictures of shops standing empty in Munich, while others have suggested themselves as potential business partners.
“A young organic farmer from the region found our project on the internet,” says Sartin.
But industry experts question whether the trend for packaging-free shops will take off in a big way.
The concentration of food shops in rural areas is shrinking, says Georg Osterhammer, a trade expert at Munich’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
He cannot imagine that an unpackaged range of products and shops could become a viable alternative, as most customers today are used to packaged products.
More realistic options are village shops, perhaps supported by mobile retailers with delivery vans, he says.  -DPA