Above the produce aisle in Berlin-Lankwitz, lettuce is growing on the roof. REWE opened its new Green Farming market on May 21, capping a timber-framed hall with a 2,760-square-meter glass greenhouse, which the company calls the largest rooftop farm in Germany. Local urban-ag specialist ECF Farmsystems runs the hydroponic operation, which will produce up to 900,000 mixed-salad units per year, harvested daily and distributed to roughly 500 REWE stores across the capital region. Seedling to shelf takes 23 days.
Rooftop farms on grocery stores aren't new. What sets REWE's concept apart is the building underneath. The market hall is built from 1,800 cubic meters of domestic softwood, with 72 stacked-timber columns left deliberately exposed across a seven-meter-high space. The wood stores roughly 930 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent, and the modular design means the wooden parts can be disassembled and reused. Waste heat from refrigeration, a heat pump, and rainwater from a cistern feed the greenhouse above. REWE has confirmed the format is going into series production, with more timber-built locations planned across Germany.
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For decades, supermarkets optimized for efficiency, and the result was a kind of clinical abstraction: fluorescent lighting, dropped ceilings, anonymous supply chains, shrink-wrap everywhere. REWE's concept pulls hard the other way. Daylight, an on-premise farm, natural materials, handcrafted counters, regional producers. All of it reads as an antidote to the sterile box. Most supermarkets can't grow lettuce on their roofs, and grocery margins don't leave much room for grand gestures. But the deeper move here is making a brand's values legible in its physical spaces, showing the producers, the materials, the supply chain instead of describing them on a sustainability page nobody reads. That part travels.