Brewing local beer with sustainability

This is a case study of a farm-based SME producing sustainable local craft beer. In contrast to the other small craft breweries that invest their resources to follow fluctuating beer trends, this SME chose to make use of their advantage of being located on a farm and made sustainability their unique selling proposition. As such, Remmarlöv Gårdsbryggeri develops sustainable beer products and invests in waste and emission reduction. 

The farm craft brewery in Remmarlöv, in the region of Scania in Sweden, was founded in 2014 by a fifth generation farmer and his wife. What started as a hobby has grown into a successful business with a yearly production of 250,000 litres of beer and over 80 different products, of which several have won awards. The brewery is eco-certified and about 30% of their products are organic. 

In Sweden, the alcoholic beverage sector is steered by the federal liquor monopoly, Systembolaget, which is the main sales channel for craft breweries and steers beer product development through tenders. Remmarlöv´s other sales channel is direct sales to restaurants. On-site farm sales are not permitted in Sweden, but a change of law is being investigated by the Swedish government.

Influenced by the owner´s farmer mentality (e.g. frugality, reusing resources) and a feeling of responsibility for the surrounding nature, sustainability has been unconsciously integrated in the company from the beginning. Sharing exchanges with other craft breweries made Remmarlöv realize that their operations and ways of handling waste were more sustainable compared to craft breweries in urban areas. This led to a sharpened sustainability profile which Remmarlöv uses as a unique selling proposition. Their sustainability practices stretch over the entire value chain and include actions such as sourcing local malt and producing their own solar and wind energy, recovering heat through heat exchangers, using an onsite wastewater treatment plant that reuses wastewater on the farm fields, feeding spent grains to the cattle on the neighbouring farms, investing in the canning line to offer beer in lightweight cans, innovating products that contain more resilient heritage barley, and educating customers by including sustainability information on the can labels. 

Remmarlöv intentionally chose to invest resources in long-term and often invisible sustainability work. Nevertheless, in a micro-sized company economic aspects are important for survival, and Remmarlöv therefore has to follow certain beer trends despite their lack of sustainability (e.g. hoppy IPAs requiring a lot of imported hops from the U.S.). Remmarlöv attempts to balance this by continuing its work in long-term change toward more sustainable beers.

Pathway maps represent the sequence businesses followed to implement successful sustainability practices and identify emerging ones within firms. The pathways also reveal the diversity of actors that begin to form sustainability enabling ecosystems for businesses to adopt, deploy or test sustainability practices.