Organic pioneer Alnatura celebrates its 40th anniversary

Doing business with purpose as the basis for success and as a model for the future

30-May-2024

Alnatura is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year: in 1984, company founder and Managing Director Götz Rehn laid the foundations for the Hessian organic company by developing the Alnatura brand. Just three years later, he opened the first Alnatura Super Natur store in Mannheim. Since then, 152 Alnatura stores have been added in Germany. In the last financial year 2022/23, around 3,500 employees generated net sales of over 1.1 billion euros. The more than 1,300 organic branded products produced under the Alnatura brand are sold in around 13,700 stores of various retail partners in 14 countries.

Guiding principle "Sensible for people and the planet"

Since its foundation, Alnatura has acted in accordance with the vision "Sensible for people and the planet". This also means that profit is not the goal, but the possible consequence of meaningful action. Alnatura only sells organic products and thus supports the spread of organic farming. Among other things, this promotes healthy soil and biodiversity by avoiding the use of synthetic chemical pesticides. In addition, organic areas store more CO2 than agro-industrially farmed soils and thus counteract climate change. "Over the past 40 years, Alnatura has helped many people to understand the positive consequences of organic farming. They know that every purchase of an organic product makes sense," says Götz Rehn.

The Alnatura initiatives

Alnatura promotes important areas of organic farming with a wide range of initiatives, such as organic seed development, animal welfare and the expansion of organic areas. To date, 119 farms have been supported in converting to organic farming with the help of the Alnatura Organic Farmer Initiative alone, which was launched in 2015. These farms cultivate a total area of around 20,000 hectares organically. The initiative is part of the "Gemeinsam Boden gut machen" ("Making the soil good together") support project of the German Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU), to which Alnatura donates an average of around 300,000 euros every year.

Alnatura also implements pioneering concepts for animal welfare: As part of the Alnatura hen welfare initiative introduced in 2013, two experts carry out regular audits on site and carefully observe how the animals are doing. This is in addition to the usual inspections and provides more certainty that Alnatura's animal welfare standards are being implemented. Alnatura thus goes well beyond the requirements of the EU Organic Regulation. With the Bruderhahn initiative from 2016, the organic retailer from Darmstadt was the first chain retailer to abolish the killing of chicks for all eggs under its brand - long before the general legal ban. The initiative ensures that the broiler chickens are reared according to organic guidelines. The latest initiative, launched in spring 2024, also focuses on animal welfare: for the comprehensive range of around 30 products in the Alnatura pasture milk initiative, the cows must graze on pasture for at least 120 days so that they can live out their natural behavior. The Alnatura criteria for pasture grazing go beyond the requirements of the EU Organic Regulation and the organic association guidelines. Pasture management also leads to more biodiversity on the pasture as well as to increased climate protection due to the high CO2 storage capacity of the nutrient-rich pasture soil.

Fair prices and long-term partnerships are also a matter of course for Alnatura: for example, Alnatura partner farms are contractually guaranteed fixed prices for grain and the purchase of their harvest. Alnatura has been certified according to the new We-Care standard for social and ecological justice along the supply chain since the beginning of 2021, demonstrating its responsibility for people and the environment.

Note: This article has been translated using a computer system without human intervention. LUMITOS offers these automatic translations to present a wider range of current news. Since this article has been translated with automatic translation, it is possible that it contains errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. The original article in German can be found here.

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