Farm to Table Home Delivery Beats Supplements in Berlin

Each and every year, New Year’s resolutions are being resurrected from drawers where they hid the past twelve months: "same procedure as every year", as the famous sketch “Dinner for one" says that's traditionally televised in Germany on New Year’s Eve. The next year, everything is supposed to be better. Start with a clean slate, a fresh start into a healthier, more vital and attractive life unburdened by bad habits and life's little sins.

Naturally, the consumer industry knows about this reoccurring chance for marketing and offers new trends every year, from vitamins to workout programs.

For a while now, eBooks with special workout programs are quite a trend, because it's possible to do it in a short break, early in the morning or before bedtime. Hyped by influential bloggers and Instagram accounts, the currently most popular program in Berlin is by Australian personal trainer Kayla Itsines. A tough 12-week program, it requires you to work out three times a week, aided by a special eating guide. The ten week challenge, a program by German trainer and choreographer Detlef D. Soost which is marketed via television and online and is a highly successful but similar approach.

Another classic new year’s resolution is better nutrition: who doesn't finally want to eat right?

Organic instead of fast food and fruit and vegetables instead of chocolate. Despite supermarkets, drug stores and pharmacies offering quite a number of vitamins and OTC dietary supplements, these products have a relatively small market share in Germany when compared to other countries. This is mostly due to failed marketing and nutrition experts in the media strongly advising against them. Personally, I don't know a single person among my friends who uses them and thinks they serve a purpose in outbalancing bad eating habits. The most advertised and known products are Vitasprint and DoppelHerz both targeted at a +60 demographic.

Instead, organic food-delivery start-ups and new farm-to-table concepts are booming, especially in Berlin. New companies such as Meine-Biokiste, and Hello Fresh have gotten quite some traction and are beginning to draw the attention of the national food retail giants with their high-margin catering to a healthier lifestyle for working people, who have short time for grocery shopping.

Beauty products of course play a vital role in starting the new year on a note of feeling fresh and beautiful: as always, long and natural lashes are in style again, and while Berlin saw a lot of synthetic lash salons like  Augenblick-Wimpernbar open in recent years, where single lashes are applied to your own, Berlin ladies this year prefer lash serums such as market leader Revitalash which promise to keep your natural lashes from falling out, enabling long natural growth.

And yet, in Berlin as elsewhere, despite all self-optimization efforts, the motto for most of us probably will once again just be "let's make better mistakes!"