Store of the week: Bio Company Brunnenstraße, Berlin

And for Brits, the word ‘organic’ and ‘supermarket’ in anything like close conjunction conjure up images of worthy but dull interiors, at best, and rampant knit-your-own-yoghurt hippydom at the green extreme of the scale.

This retailer avoids almost all of these preconceptions. From the outside, the green strip with white font across the upper fascia certainly does chime with what you might expect of a ‘green’ retailer, but step inside and the store is a slickly executed exercise in making you feel better about shopping at a supermarket.

If you’re looking for wood-clad fixturing, this interior does not disappoint, taking as its basis whitewashed pallets that are used to clad the equipment and then employed in a scaled-down version as overhead billboards. On these, Bio Company plays the provenance card with monochrome pictures of producers and their products.

At the risk of sounding a little geeky it is the chiller units at the rear that really impress. These have frameless doors, are backlit and use non-reflective glass, meaning that you see the whole of the product and nothing but the product.

The last part of the journey to the checkout features a health and beauty area of the kind that would put most Continental pharmacies to shame, let alone the average high street chemist over here.

If you need to see how organics can be made both appealing and efficient, there are few better places to take a look. And it’s a chain, meaning that it’s working from a commercial perspective as well.