Ekoplaza - a rising star in the organic market in Holland

Erik Does has been in the organic business for over 20 years, and he’s a total professional with a profound conviction in all things organic. This year he’s harvesting what he has sown over the years: an increase of €16m is what his wholesale wholefood business Udea is making in a single year – a huge rise that is testimony, on the one hand, to the quality of the services he provides and the price structure of his company and, on the other, to the weakness of competitors who are increasingly being ignored by the wholefood stores they had been supplying. With EkoPlaza, Udea has its own retail arm that via franchising also invites independent stores to join.

(Picture: EkoPlaza – 500 m² - in downtown Amsterdam)
“At the moment, we’re in the process of renovating ageing shops and looking for new locations for the expansion of our chain,” explains the 44-year-old Does, whose parents transferred their wholefood store to him in 1992. At the time he was 23, and step by step his enterprise has grown until in 2013 he is experiencing, in absolute figures, the highest growth so far. And he wants to carry on apace: in November, the 65th EkoPlaza with 500 m² of retail area is opening in Wassenaar, and at the beginning of 2014 in Capelle aan den Ijssel there will be another with over 300 m². In September 2013, an EkoPlaza in Tilburg was extended from 320 m² to 600 m²; two more stores followed in December, one with a doubling and the other with a tripling of retail space to a good 600 m² in each case. A further renovation and expansion of area is scheduled for the beginning of 2014 in Enschede on the German Dutch border, where the store is to be expanded from 300 m² to 500 m². (Picture: Erik Does with the company’s own brand that covers 250 articles)

“We own about half the stores we operate, and the others are predominantly former Natuurwinkel shops. 56 shops belonged to the earlier franchise concept of the competitor Natudis (we reported on the opening of what was at that time still called Natuurwinkel). After Natudis was sold in 2006 to the Dutch company Wessanen, and in 2010 the fresh food wholesaler Kroon was bought, the split with Udea came about. Until that point the wholesaler Udea had supplied the Natuurwinkel shops with fresh products.

To make a stand against the competition, Erik Does decided to expand. He added a dry goods range of 3,000 articles to his fresh food lines. “Another factor was that Natudis supplied the same goods under a different label to conventional supermarket chains at significantly lower prices and in this way alienated the wholefood shops,” an industry insider revealed.
With favourable pricing and no big corporation in the background, more and more shops switched from the wholesaler Natudis to Udea. In the same move, the Natuurwinkel name on the shop fronts disappeared and were replaced by EkoPlaza. Now only a dozen or so Natuurwinkel stores still exist in Holland. In Amsterdam alone, there are eleven EkoPlaza stores.

While Erik Does predicts that the specialist trade in Holland will grow by
3 – 5 %, the wholesaler Udea is growing by a massive 21 % from €74m to a probable €90m. Apart from the 64 EkoPlaza stores, Udea supplies 500 wholefood shops, drugstores, small local shops in the countryside and restaurants. It doesn‘t supply conventional supermarket chains. In total, there are 365 specialist wholefood stores and in most cases quite small health food shops in the Netherlands. (Picture: The new store in Wassenaar)

At EkoPlaza (retail) the growth in turnover will rise from 8 % in 2012 to around 15 % in 2013, which is also down to new openings. The owners of Udea are Erik Does and Erik-Jan van den Brink who began with a small fresh vegetable wholesale business in 1992. The pair have been working together since 1995, and in 1999 they merged the two wholesale warehouses in Veghel (40,000 inhabitants) that lies between s’Hertogenbosch and Eindhoven in the south of the country. The town has good transport links, and several food chains have located their warehouses there.

“Beyond bio” is the name of the purchasing network to which the 64 EkoPlaza stores and a further eight wholefood shops belong, in order to negotiate with manufacturers to obtain more favourable conditions. A product range commission deals with the products that are to be listed. “We want a good selection at realistic prices,” is the credo of Erik Does. He would like his next venture to be expanding the existing webshop to encompass boxes of goods that customers can collect. The system, that was tried out with a farm shop, a small food shop and two health food shops, functions as follows: customers use the internet to place orders, and the goods are delivered to one of the sales points that they in any case have to drive to. This means that there are no extra transport costs, and consumers in rural areas that don’t have a local shop with a full organic range can nevertheless choose from around 5,000 articles. (Picture: Erik Does, right, in the new store in Wassenaar)

Udea’s wholesale arm now employs 200 people, and the EkoPlaza retail business has approximately 450 employees. They have facilities for training and further training their employees near the railway station in the university town of Utrecht, to the east of Amsterdam. Depending on their previous education, 90 employees can take a one-to-three-year course there that both trains and motivates them for working in a dynamic wholefood company. (Picture on the right: Opening of an new organic supermarket in Wassenaar in November 2013)

To ensure that their future growth in the retail wholefood trade is not left to chance, they launch an advertising campaign every year. “We’re looking for ambassadors,” Does explains. “They may be individual organic farmers, nutrition advisers, well known chefs, sportsmen and women or people like that, who appear in our ads and state publically that they eat organic food.” Examples are the well known snowboarder in Holland, Nicolien Sauerbreij, and the rower Mitchel Steenman. The first campaign in the spring of 2012, that ran for ten weeks in 50 EkoPlazas, and the ambassador campaign in the spring of 2013, that ran for seven weeks, involved TV ads, advertisements in daily newspapers and on YouTube, Facebook, etc. “We were already on track for the older dark green consumer, but now we’ve widened the trend to take in new and much younger consumers too,” the managing director of EkoPlaza and Udea is delighted to report.

“We want to provide a place for those people to go to who are looking for a healthy lifestyle,” says Does. He explains this is why they have collaborated with the University of Tilburg to carry out consumer studies. The university surveyed 4,000 customers of EkoPlaza stores and established that they have a better body-mass index, drink less alcohol, more vegetables, are physically more active and are as a whole more healthy.


Tip:
www.ekoplaza.nl