Eating and shopping consciously is a growing trend among consumers. SPAR Austria meets these consumer needs through an extensive product range, including 28,000 regional products, unpackaged and increasingly plastic-free packaged products, reusable packaging, and a large selection of alternatives to animal products.

Growth of organic own brands

The growing demand for organic foods at SPAR has resulted in double-digit sales growth in this category over the past few years.

To meet this growing demand, SPAR Austria in 2021 added 150 new products to its organic own brand range SPAR Natur*pur, which achieved an annual sales increase of 12%. Currently, SPAR offers more than 3,000 organic products across its assortments in Austria.

In 2021, SPAR Austria also introduced organic products produced using biodynamic agricultural techniques (Demeter). The share of organic products in SPAR Austria’s total sales has already reached 12%.

Furthermore, SPAR Austria also offers over 2,500 vegan and vegetarian products, with the SPAR Veggie own brand range recording an annual sales increase of 8%.

Tackling food waste

To curb food waste, SPAR Austria has partnered with social impact company Too Good To Go. Within ten weeks after signing a nationwide partnership in October 2021, SPAR Austria and Too Good To Go successfully sold 100,000 bags of food nearing its use-by date. By purchasing the bags, 90,000 SPAR Austria customers have helped avoid about 1 million food products from going to waste and about 750 tonnes of related CO2 emissions.

The SPAR Too Good To Go food packages, named ‘Magic Bags’ on the app, can be picked up at participating SPAR Austria stores. The bags contain products nearing their sell-by dates, such as dairy, fresh produce, and baked products.

Find more information on SPAR Austria’s annual results and developments for the year 2021 here.

Source: SPAR Austria

Read more news from SPAR Austria.

About SPAR Austria

The origins of SPAR in Austria date back to 1954, but the current SPAR AG was created in 1970 when the original founding families joined with other regional wholesalers to form SPAR Austria AG – a 100% privately owned Austrian company.

With licences granted by SPAR International, ASPIAG (Austria SPAR International AG) has developed SPAR in Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, and Northern Italy. With sales of €8.3 billion and impressive growth of 16%, SPAR Austria became the market leader in the Austrian grocery trade during 2020, after being a market growth leader for over a decade.