New Rewe Concept: Temma

After a year of planning, the great day arrived: on 25.11.2009, via its subsidiary Bio-Konzept, Rewe opened an organic supermarket (800 m²) in the south of Cologne. It is intended to appeal to new customers who have hitherto not bought organics, and to impress with its high level of service. Presentation is, of course, attractive but it’s not meant to look expensive. 1,100 people came through the doors on the first day. Now Rewe is going to sit back and evaluate the store for a year and do some fine-tuning before planning more locations.
The potential for Rewe’s new concept is unlikely to be 2,000 stores countrywide, but 200-300 are certainly within the bounds of possibility. However, the managing directors of Bio-Konzept, Christiane Speck and Heinz-Jürgen Maziejewski (at the front in the picture with store manager Rainer Hofheinz and Elke Wiegmann, the head of strategic controlling Rewe Group) won’t commit themselves to a number. “The customers recall the values we used to have in the past, and many of them no longer want cheap, cheap,” says Speck. Goods are displayed on simple metal shelves to create more impact. The ceiling is plain and the floor is cement-grey concrete.

“The idea is to create a market atmosphere with well filled shelves of fruit and vegetables in the middle of the store,” explains the 33-year-old Speck. Attractively arranged piles of tomatoes (picture), stacked hokkaido pumpkins or fresh herbs encourage customers to buy. Mainly perishable vegetables like cauliflower and lettuce are kept in the chilled section, where a fine mist passes over them to keep them fresh. Various facilities, that have been placed round the central fruit and vegetable area and the dry goods shelves, invite customers to linger. The idea is to develop the store into a meeting point for people from the affluent residential areas Bayenthal and Marienburg. To let people know about the new store, students were hired to distribute 3,000 Temma bags with a pack of clementines, spices and tea, an info sheet “Hallo, we’re new here!” and a drink (Bionade or bios).

The walls in both the natural cosmetics (picture) and bakery departments are partly tiled with expensive natural stone. Next to cosmetics and body care is the tea department with a wide product range and measuring about 30 m². The wall at the back of the cheese counter and the bakery department is covered in brick-format white tiles. On the right side of the store are the bakery with two ovens, a dozen solid oak tables to seat 60 people and the cheese department, all covering an area of 170 m². Oak parquet flooring that matches the tables defines this area from the rest of the store. Soft background music puts the customers in a good mood.

The service areas are an outstanding feature in this new Temma organic supermarket: fresh rolls and bread baked in-store, 80 sorts of loose tea (picture) and the bistro, that at Temma is called “Deli” as in American stores. “If a customer wants to order something, we are, of course, happy to oblige and we meet special requests too,” says Mrs Speck.

Collaboration with the company My Muesli enables customers to put together their favourite combination from 80 different ingredients on the computer and to order by paying in advance with a 10 euro prepaid card or credit card. The Muesli is sent to Temma within five days and is ready for collection. The customer saves the cost of delivery. He is informed by email when his order has arrived. The customer can instruct his PC to store his personal muesli creation so that it can be retrieved at any time. Temma is also planning a delivery service from next February to supply midday meals to people working at the new harbour in Rheinau.

Incidentally, the name of the new store is an abbreviation of Tante Emma and is intended to remind us of the personal atmosphere and the service orientation of the little corner shops in earlier times. The slogan was: “Tante Emma meets urban lifestyle”.

The developer of the concept, Christiane Speck (she joined the company in June 2009 as the successor to Elke Rieckh) and Elke Wiegmann would like to see the new Temma store become a meeting place like corner shops used to be. Consequently, the opening times are especially long: from 7.00 in the morning to 22.00 at night. The bakery is open from 8.00 to 13.00 on Sundays. The store employs 25 people. The target is at least 1,000 customers a day and a spend per person of well over 15 euros.

So, with breakfast available from as early as 7 o’clock in the morning, you can choose from croissants and muesli and a wide variety of freshly baked products and hot drinks. There is special toast for children, and rounding off the menu is fresh fruit salad. For lunch there are soups of the day (2.90/3.50 €), quiche (2.90 €), side-dish salads (1.50 €) and puff pastry with cheese and a salad combination (3.90 €) (called “Traiteur”). Various snacks are to be had costing between 9.50 and 11.50 euros, Finnish toast with turkey breast and a selection of sandwiches (at Temma they call them “Klappbrot”). For dessert there’s a choice of baked apple (2.50 €), royal cupcake (3 €) and various quark crèmes (2.50 €).

Whilst they want to implement the Temma concept in stores with 500-800 m², the current Vierlinden organic supermarkets, that have been created since 2005, have between 400 and 600 m² of retail space (see our earlier report). They have suspended ceilings, and in some areas, such as fruit and vegetables, canopies hang from the ceiling. Orange-tone lighting, in for example Eching near Munich, is intended to create a feel-good ambience. There are currently four of these stores in Nordrhein-Westfalen, and two in Munich. For the time being, no more stores are to be opened. So far nothing has come of the original plan to create a nationwide chain within a few years. Parking is a further advantage of the new Temma store.120 ground-level parking spaces are available to customers of Temma and the adjacent Rewe store (over 2,000 m²).

Compared with Vierlinden stores, the product range at Temma has been reduced by 3,000 items, although it still stocks 5,000 articles. Rewe’s organic own brand products have been on sale at Vierlinden stores for the last six months, and they are now stocked by Temma. They would now like to go further and develop a full Temma own brand range. Currently the approximately 20 Temma own brand articles are the classics like tomato sauce, olive oil, noodles and wine, but the intention is to gradually expand the number of products. The main suppliers are Landlinie, Biogarten and Pural. (Picture: Temma own brand)

Comment: No, the new concept from the House of Rewe is not revolutionary, but it is a good try. We find the combination of organic supermarket and bistro or café elsewhere at, for example, Naturata, that is about 3 km to the north of the new Temma store. A well stocked tea department with service is not unique either (Biogate/Trier, Kaliss/Ludwigsburg). Nor are the white wall tiles in klinker brick style (The Natural Kitchen/London).

It is unlikely that Temma will tap into a new source of customers who have never bought organics and will now be converted. It may be that new customers will go there with no preconceptions, but then they’ll see unfamiliar brands and the higher prices, and a turning point will be reached if people are not willing to commit to organic consumption. Time will tell whether, with a lot of services and a high number of staff, they can convince people to stay with the new store and the Rewe organic supermarket concept. For the organic industry the concept is nothing new, but probably it is new for a big concern like Rewe, where for decades they’ve been trying to save on staff and to operate with as low costs as possible with the aim of more than just defying the discounters.

Address: Temma, Schönhauser Allee 64, Cologne