Spain: EsdeRaíz presents its new online shop

EsdeRaíz has launched its online shop for ecological and local food. Producers are closely connected with consumers to promote rural development and guarantee fair prices for both parties. According to data of the Spanish Society of Ecological Agriculture (SEAE), production and distribution of this type of food and beverages has kept growing during the whole crisis by from 6% to 10%. This is partly due to exports to the rest of the EU and starting a few months ago to the USA, which are opening their market to organic products from Europe. But the organic market is also on the rise in Spain, thanks to 15 years of promotion campaigns for organic food. So far, however, this type of consumption hasn’t affected the ecological offer in conventional supermarkets, Agencia Dossier reports.

Despite the economic crisis, or perhaps due to it, an increasing number of business initiatives are created in rural areas, supported by internet, mobile phones and social networks. EsdeRaíz specializes on selling ecological and regional products via internet, a distribution channel that, according to the Ecological Agriculture Bureau for Advice of Andalucia, today represents less than 5% of organic sales in Spain. Some of the most successful sale initiatives through the internet are the ones that directly connect producers with consumers and therefore provide the best prices.

The internet shop of Pedro Garcia has been online since October: “The main motivation of EsdeRaíz is to offer healthy, great quality food to consumers, assuring sustainable criteria and transparency of products, raw materials, processes and the people who are behind it.” All suppliers of EsdeRaíz have been visited by Pedro Garcia. Production details and his experiences are revealed on the company’s website. A large part of the products of EsdeRaíz is certified organic or awaiting certification, and others are local products that follow sustainable criteria.

“Consumers want ecological products but, in many cases, they have no way of purchasing them”, Maria Zapata has explained in Madrid. She is responsible for the national project Cooperative Taste of the consumer association ASGECO. “80% or 90% of domestic production is exported and does not stay on our markets. We certainly need more and better establishments to make sure that the ecological or local products get to the consumer”, she stated.

To meet the requirements of traditional buyers, EsDeRaíz also runs a specialised shop with organic, natural, and handcrafted products at the well-known market Santa Maria de la Cabeza in Madrid (see picture above and to the left). At this shop, too, all information of the products and producers is provided to the customers and producers are classified for their values, for example "job creation", "organic production", "handcrafted", etc. More information (in Spanish) is available here: EsDeRaíz