Best Organic Supermarket in Lisbon

The Biocoop in Lisbon, founded ten years ago as a shop for members, has developed into a successful organic supermarket. What is simply not available in all other wholefood shops and health food shops in Portugal can be found here in abundance, namely green, white and red fresh foods.

Picture: A wide range of fresh fruit and vegetables at Biocoop

Angelo Rocha (picture) once played in a radio orchestra, but he was also one of the team that launched Biocoop and he has become its managing director. His father is an organic farmer, and now the son is in charge of 70 organic producers who supply Biocoop. 2500 families are members of the producer-consumer association that has built up an exemplary marketing scheme in Lisbon. The 450 m² store is, however, still housed in premises intended to be provisional, but this situation is set to change in March 2007. They will then move into new premises with 1000 m² of retail space and 1000 m² that will serve as a wholesale distribution point. With many farmers driving up regularly to the warehouse that functions as a shop near the airport (a plane roars overhead every two minutes), Biocoop want to give other stores the opportunity to purchase their stock here at wholesale prices. The 45 year old Mr Rocha, who was one of the founders of the Portuguese organic farmers association Agrobio twenty years ago,  sees this as the best way in which both established shop owners and  newcomers can supplement what they sell (mostly dry goods) with fresh foods from the region.

“I appreciate the excellent stock and I regularly do my shopping here, despite having to travel quite a distance by car”, one customer (picture) explained. Biocoop is located well out of the centre of town and can only be reached by car, and this is a situation that will not change when the new store is up and running. Mr Rocha defends the choice of location: “The producers coming from various parts of Portugal simply turn off the motorway and they are here in no time, which is much easier than struggling through the heavy traffic in the city centre. But costumers mainly come only once a week to do their shoppings”

The store consists of two sections linked by a ramp. The customer first enters the section devoted to every kind of fresh food except bakery products. The trays and boxes are bursting with lettuces, tomatoes, carrots and cabbages and you really get the impression of being spoilt for choice. Of course, there are masses of fruit and, in the autumn, pumpkins. Along the wall at the back, you can find the dairy products, and packaged meat is kept in chilled cabinets (picture below).

“We achieve 70 % of our turnover on Fridays and Saturdays - that’s when we could do with more than our 80 trolleys”, Angelo Rocha explains. Customers spend on average 50 Euros every time they do their shopping in the store. “Most of them do their weekly shopping here, and they buy most of what they need from us.”  You can get practically anything here, even including textiles, nappies and stationery (by Memo). There is, of course, a large display of toiletries and natural cosmetics. Each week 1 000 customers shop at Biocoop, which results in an annual turnover of 2.5 million Euros. In 2005, turnover grew by 30 %, and 20 % growth is anticipated in 2006.

At first sight it is not obvious that Biocoop is a members’ store. There is no check on who comes in and this means that anyone can shop here. Customers are asked for their membership card at the till. Customers without membership ID are allowed to shop three times, after which they have to become members by paying a 25 Euro annual subscription. After the move to new premises in the coming year, a dual price system is planned to make it easy for non-members to shop there.

The background is the legal situation in Portugal that gives tax advantages to cooperatives and makes their organic products less expensive. “For example, our meat is hardly any dearer than conventional quality meat”, says Mr Rocha, who is so pleased that all of his customers can afford the top quality product, not just a minority. Since some imported goods that account for about 40 % of turnover, are two to three times as expensive as conventional products, it is important for Biocoop to keep prices low through its pricing of domestic goods. The current 2500 products, with food accounting for 90 %, will rise to more than 4000 in the new store. Meat, some fish and milk products will account for 20 % of turnover, fruit and vegetables for 30 %, bread and bakery products for 10 %, the dry goods range for 30 % and washing and cleaning products, cosmetics, textiles and stationery for 10 %. Incidentally, as Antonio Mantas from Portugal’s biggest certification agency Sativa explained, all wholefood stores (currently around 20) selling fruit and vegetables loose are checked once a year by an organic control authority. This check costs about 250 Euros.

A big problem at the moment is that all milk products (picture) and the majority of imported goods have to be obtained via the Biocoop wholesaler in France. Portugal still does not have its own organic dairy.

It is fortuitous that Biocoop has the same name as the large-scale purchasing association in France. When Biocoop was founded in Lisbon in 1993, there was no contact with France. When, after a number of years, someone drew attention to the identical names, Angelo Rocha made contact with Biocoop’s headquarters in France and, in the meantime, a high level of collaboration has developed. On the bookshelves at Biocoop in Lisbon, you find a lot of French books on health and the environment, because the Portuguese book market still does not have much to offer on these topics, and many Portuguese have learned French at school.