Original Unverpackt was a Berlin grocery shop built around one simple rule: nothing on sale came in single-use packaging. Customers brought their own jars, bags and bottles, filled them from bulk dispensers and paid by weight. It opened in the Kreuzberg district on 13 September 2014, a few weeks after this story first ran, and it became one of the best-known packaging-free shops in Europe.
The idea sounds obvious now, with refill stations in many supermarkets, but in 2014 it was a genuine experiment. Here is how the shop worked, who started it, how it was paid for and what happened to it later.
The idea: shopping without throwaway packaging
Most packaging in a supermarket is used once, for a few days, and then thrown away. Original Unverpackt ("original unpackaged" in German) set out to remove that step entirely. Instead of shelves of boxes and plastic trays, the shop used gravity bins for grains, pasta, nuts and pulses, open crates for fruit and vegetables, and refill stations for liquids.
The founders said they wanted shoppers to decide two things for themselves: how much food they took home and how much rubbish came with it. Buying exactly 80 grams of a spice instead of a fixed 100-gram packet was part of the appeal, because it also cut food waste.
The German-language video shows the concept in practice, from the bulk dispensers to customers weighing their own containers.
How a visit worked
A trip to a packaging-free shop follows a short routine, and Original Unverpackt helped popularise it:
- Bring containers. Clean jars, cloth bags, tins or bottles from home. Shoppers who forgot could borrow or buy reusable ones in store.
- Weigh them empty. The container's weight, called the tare, is noted so you only pay for the food.
- Fill up. Take as much or as little as you need from the dispensers.
- Pay by weight. The tare is subtracted at the till.
The range grew quickly. A German start-up magazine reported that the shop opened with about 350 products and had passed 550 a year later, including dry goods, cleaning products and toiletries.
The founders and the crowdfunding campaign
The shop was the work of Milena Glimbovski, born in Siberia in 1990 and raised in Germany, and her co-founder Sara Wolf. They developed the plan while Glimbovski was still a student. Small private investors paid for the early phase, and a crowdfunding campaign on the German platform Startnext covered the rest.
That campaign is often cited as proof of public appetite for the idea. Wikipedia puts the amount raised at €100,000; US coverage in 2014 described a target of about $61,000 that was beaten roughly twice over within three weeks. The exact figures vary between reports, but every account agrees the target was cleared easily. Wolf later left the business, and Glimbovski went on to co-found a publishing house, Ein guter Verlag, in 2015. A Berlin jury named her Entrepreneur of the Year in 2018.
Why packaging waste matters
The 2014 article claimed that Americans produce "near 3 pounds of trash every day". Official figures are actually higher. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that each American generated about 4.9 pounds of municipal solid waste per day in 2018, or 292.4 million tons in total, and that only about 32 percent was recycled or composted. Containers and packaging are one of the largest categories in that pile.
The old post also said that 80 percent of supermarket stock is wrapped in "toxic" packaging. We could not find a source for that number, and most food packaging is not toxic in normal use. The real problem is volume: materials designed to last for decades are used for days and then landfilled, burned or lost into the environment.
Packaging-free shopping tackles that at the source. Even so, it is not automatically greener in every case. Lightweight film can protect fragile food from spoiling, and a car trip to a distant specialist shop can cancel out the savings of a few jars. The biggest gains come from staples you buy often, from shops you would visit anyway.
What happened to Original Unverpackt
The shop inspired many similar stores in Germany and abroad and is widely credited with starting the German zero-waste shop movement. The years after 2020 were hard, though. Berlin's Tagesspiegel reported that the pandemic strained the business and that inflation after Russia's invasion of Ukraine pushed it into difficulty.
Original Unverpackt GmbH filed for insolvency at the Charlottenburg District Court on 16 June 2022. Other packaging-free shops were struggling at the same time; one in Dortmund had already closed. On 1 September 2022 investor Katharina Richter took over the business, keeping the Kreuzberg shop, the online shop and all staff, according to the company's own press release. In late 2022 the new management ran a second, much smaller crowdfunding campaign to fund a fresh start. Glimbovski is no longer chief executive.
Lessons for shoppers and for shops
The story of Original Unverpackt shows both the promise and the limits of the idea. Customers loved it in principle, but a small independent shop must compete on price and convenience with large chains, and those chains have since added their own refill corners.
If you want to cut packaging without a specialist store nearby, a few habits do most of the work:
- Keep a small set of bags and jars in the car or by the door.
- Buy loose fruit and vegetables instead of pre-packed ones.
- Choose larger packs of staples you use quickly, and refill smaller containers at home.
- Use market stalls, bakeries and deli counters that will fill your own container.
- Avoid overbuying, since wasted food carries all the waste of its packaging too.
In 2014 the founders told supporters that their generation had "littered the world" and the next one might do better. A decade on, refill shelves in ordinary supermarkets suggest the idea has outlived the uncertainty of the shop that made it famous.
Sources: Original report by TakePart via True Activist; Wikipedia: Milena Glimbovski; StartingUp: Gründer der Woche, Original Unverpackt; Original Unverpackt press release on the insolvency and takeover; Tagesspiegel, 25 November 2022; Leinetal24, 8 July 2022; US EPA: National overview of materials and waste.
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