Helsinki: good offer in specialist stores and wholefood stores

In the Finnish capital, in the summer of 2013 you find ten wholefood shops, including two quite large specialist stores. Eat & Joy operates six outlets, two stores belong to Ruohonjuuri Ekomarket (picture) and there’s a shop called Ekolo. Tuusulan Oma Maa is a small vegan cooperative with a little shop measuring just 30m². (Photo: Charlie Wong, left, Eeropekka Rislakki, right, Eat & Joy)
 

The group of seven friends who set up Eat & Joy chose a wholly new approach. Freshness and taste are the guiding principles governing their selection of products. The specialist store, that is intended to remind you of a weekly market, is located in the basement of a little department store in Helsinki’s pedestrian precinct. “In 2009 we got going nearby with 74 m²,” Eeropekka Rislakki explains. “We began with 200 small producers, and now we cooperate with about 500 farmers,” says Rislakki. The farmers belong to producer organizations, so that the company has to place orders with “only“ 50 suppliers. The producers deliver direct to the shop, although recently they have sometimes made use of Hella Logistics, that belongs to Finland’s postal service. This company provides cost-effective direct delivery of meat products, cheese (picture) or dairy products in cool boxes to people’s homes or to the shops.

Since Eat & Joy started so successfully, in 2011 they moved to premises with a retail area of 380 m² in the Kluvi district. With toilet facilities, storage rooms and offices, the total area occupied by Eat & Joy is now 540 m². In 2010, 2011 and 2013, shop-in-shop branches (100 m²) were opened in three Prisma department stores. Two more stores were opened in different parts of Helsinki’s airport in 2011, bringing Eat & Joy’s tally of shops to six. Most of what has to be imported comes from the British company Suma.
  

Of the 900 articles stocked by Eat & Joy, about half come from organic agriculture. Before they are listed as suppliers, all farmers are visited. The company only accepts those farmers who can demonstrate environmental practices, animal welfare, artisan processing or Fairtrade production. The main criterion is, however, the unadulterated taste of products that must be to the liking of customers. “In many cases that means Demeter or other organic products,“ says Charlie Wong, who is responsible for the company’s small volume of imports. 90 % of their products are sourced from Finnish producers.

Between a big cheese and meat products counter and the milk bar, with bakery goods and fresh salads, stand eight tables for around 35 people (see picture). 11.30 to 14.00 is the main time when they fetch a light meal from the counter and sit at the tables to eat it.  “We sell 140 meals a day,” says  Eeropekka Rislakki. You can select from salads, soups, hot dishes, quiche, cake, vegetarian kebabs, fish dishes and open sandwiches. Everything is prepared fresh in situ in the rented show kitchen and show bakery. Kitting out the shop in the autumn of 2011 entailed a high level of investment for, among other things, an original wood-burning oven and a 54 m high chimney. “Taste is the main reason why customers come to us, but they also want to support the farmers and environmentally friendly production,” the around 55-year-old explains. This summer, they are organizing farm visits, so that consumers are better informed.
 

“We celebrated our thirtieth anniversary last year,” says Sirkku Pilvi, the manager of the biggest of the four Ruohonjuuri stores (see picture). The name means something like grass roots. Two of the stores are in Helsinki and, since 2003, one has been operating in Tampere, 175 km to the north of the capital. The other one has been in Turku, 167 km from Helsinki on the west coast, since 2006. The store in the pedestrian precinct in the centre of Helsinki has 250 m² of retail space, and the store in the Hakaniemen district around 150 m². The store in Tampere, that is regarded as an eco-stronghold, and the store in Turku both have around 150 m² of retail area. The cooperative consists of about 200 members, including several eco-organizations.

The stores get their goods from about 50 suppliers, who operate differently from in Germany, where wholefood wholesalers combine supplies by bundling the goods streams. Since Finland itself produces only a small volume of goods, a lot have to be imported, and you see many German organic brands in the shops. If the goods don’t come direct from German wholesalers, however, the products become more expensive, because they are handled by various middlemen and importers. This means that imported food can cost twice as much as in Germany, an example being 3.30 – 3.60 € for Vivani chocolate. Chocolate specialities by Omber, Lovechock or Conscious cost the equivalent of nine to ten euros for 100 g.
 
The only products sourced in the immediate vicinity of the capital for Ruohonjuuri are bread, bakery goods and, in season, strawberries. Their product range consists of approximately 4,000 articles, that include a large number of natural cosmetics. In the case of cosmetics, Ruohonjuuri concentrates on the well known brands Lavera, Santé and Dr. Hauschka, and Mádara from Latvia. Flow Kosmetiikka is the only Finnish firm to offer a wide range of soaps, shower gels, etc. Consumers can save on price by filling their own containers from 20 sorts of detergents, cleaning materials and personal care products. (Picture: Customers take full advantage of the wide range of loose detergents and cleaning materials at Ruohonjuuri)

The company is thinking about more stores and some are at the planning stage, such as in Espoo in greater Helsinki. Locations are first trialled with a medium size store of around 150 m² and, if successful, they then move to bigger premises. Since 2011, customers have also been able to buy via a webshop, which in a country with such wide open spaces is a boon for consumers living a long way from a wholefood store.

Ekolo  is the name of the joint enterprise that runs a wholefood shop (206 m²) in the Hakaniemen district to the north of the city centre. The aim of the shop,
that opened in a different location in 2004, is to improve the provision of vegan food. The shop doesn’t stock dairy and meat products. It is now located in a side-street not far from the centre of the district, that has a market hall and weekly market in the spacious Siltasaari Square. Ekolo is fitted out with wooden shelving and gives the impression of being a typical wholefood shop.
The service is friendly and helpful. In Jyväskylä, 250 km to the north of Helsinki, a second shop has been opened in 2004, which moved last year. Jyväskylä, in central Finland, has 133,000 inhabitants and is the seventh biggest city in Suomi, as the country is called in Finnish. Apart from the two shops, the company operates a wholesale business and a webshop. A list on the internet shows the brands on offer in Ekolo - from Numi-Tee, Bio-Planète and Hanf-Natur to Bonvita, Govinda and Oasis.

There is a very attractively presented organic fruit and vegetable stall in the market hall in Hakaniemen that has been run for ten years by Satu Koivuniemi. Every day, between 50 and 200 people buy from the 18 m² stall that is first in a line of stalls near the entrance to the hall. This means that Satu Koivuniemi’s stall can be approached on three sides, which keeps her very busy, since it is open ten hours a day six days a week (8.00 – 18.00). She has use of a 6 m² storage room in the cellar, where she can store unsold goods overnight. The fresh fruit and vegetables really stand out, so that it’s not only committed friends of organic who do their shopping there. However, Mrs Koivuniemi doesn’t always find it easy to get the best produce. (Photo: bustling organic stand in the market hall Hakaniemen)

The wholesaler Satotu KKU, that stocks mainly conventional goods, often doesn’t have the selection of organic products that she would like, and the French wholefood wholesaler Dynamis, where she quite often orders her stock, is far away in Rungis outside Paris. The orders are dispatched on a Tuesday and they arrive on a Friday. It doesn’t leave her much time to sell them. As well as fruit and vegetables, that are laid out on the stall in front of the customers, at the back she keeps a small selection of longer-life products like tomato sauce, rice, noodles, pesto, vinegar and oil. Satu Koivuniemi regrets that no other organic business is located in the market hall, with its quite special ambience, or in the open-air weekly market in front of the hall. “Then organic would have a higher profile here, and I wouldn’t be the only one fighting for the cause,” she declares. (Picture: Satu Koivuniemi at her stand in the market hall)

There are other eco-projects in Finland. Recently, an organic training centre was launched, called Mäntslälän Puutarhaoppilaitos. More organic shops are included in Helsinki’s eco city plan that the “Association of Finnish Eco Entrepreneurs” has drawn up during 2013. It includes restaurants that use organic ingredients and shops selling natural textiles and natural goods.

(Photo: Inside Ruohonjuuri)

Tip:

www.eatandjoy.fi 
www.ruohonjuuri.fi
www.ekolo.fi