Bottle after bottle of Club Mate, countless cups of coffee and kebabs on the go – let’s face it, when you think of the typical Berlin startup diet, ‘healthy’ isn’t one of the first words which comes to mind.
But one company wants to change all that. Dein Biogarten (‘Your Bio Garden’) offers fresh, organic fruit and veg for order online and delivered daily – from a startup, for startups.
And it’s all thanks to a Facebook game: “I was playing Farmville quite a lot when it first became popular,” Dein Biogarten co-founder Philipp v. Sahr told Silicon Allee. “And then Kaspar (Haller, his fellow co-founder) and I thought about combining that concept with the organic food trend, and food e-commerce was about to start in Germany.”
Philipp hopes Dein Biogarten will stand out from other German-based online food stores as it only supplies food grown from organic, bio-certified growers.
Working with a small group of organic food traders based in Berlin, and with partner and strategic investor Fruchthof Wulfen growing and harvesting their own plantation in Saxony every season, the Dein Biogarten team are not only able to control the produce sourced, but also to keep the travel time and costs passed on to the consumer to a minimum.
Philipp added: “We have the most hands-on investor in Germany! He grows a major portion of our crops, as well as buying and packaging all the other produce he is unable to grow himself. His involvement means that we’re able to track exactly which farms the food comes from, even from Berlin.”
And that, in turn, means that they can offer their customers the freshest produce. “Last summer, we harvested our own carrot crop in the morning, in the afternoon the produce was packaged up, and the next morning it had arrived on people’s doorsteps. So it’s fresh, and good. And soon we’ll be expanding, having a range of thirty fruits and vegetables customers and startups can choose to order from.”
Dein Biogarten’s green message also stretches to delivery thanks to a partnership with DHL’s Go Green service, which offers carbon dioxide-neutral transport across Germany.
The biggest problem, however, remains the difficulty of motivating companies to eat healthier. This is especially true with startups, where workers are so involved in their jobs – and especially in somewhere like Berlin, where takeaway food is so cheap and plentiful – that it can be hard to persuade people.
Philipp, though, is determined to change that: “My goal right now is to advertise to startups in Berlin, and to show them how good it would be for their employees to have access to fresh fruit and vegetables in the office to keep them healthy and happier, we see it as a real morale booster.”
With repeat customers such as Groupon purchasing up to 80 kilos of fresh produce a day, as well as EyeEm and Phonedeck having also tested out the service, Dein Biogarten hopes to help Berlin’s startups “keep the doctor away” by making it easy to order an apple a day – online.