Delinat: Pleasing palates the sustainable way
Dietikon, 14 October 2021
Good food, good company and an excellent drop of wine: life’s simple pleasures. If this sounds like your sort of thing, you may want to check out Delinat and Planzer Parcel.
Pure delight, from mouse click to your front door
Ordering wine online? Once upon a time, it would have been unthinkable. Today, it’s standard practice among wine connoisseurs, many of whom have signed up to one of Europe’s most popular wine subscriptions. Thirty percent of all purchases from the organic wine specialist Delinat are made via their online shop. Place your order and before you know it, your doorbell will be ringing. A member of our professional Planzer Parcel team will be there to hand over your delicious delivery. Unpack, marvel and enjoy. And before your next delivery, simply place the empty box outside your door.
DEDICATED TO NATURE
‘Enjoy with a clear conscience.’ Delinat used this slogan to advertise its products in the 1980s. The clear conscience was down to two factors: treating yourself to healthy wine, free from harmful substances, and doing something for nature with every sip. Times have changed. But Delinat’s ambition remains the same: wine from nature’s bounty. For over 40 years now, the Swiss business has been demonstrating that winegrowing works perfectly without chemicals. All it takes is rich biodiversity in the vineyard and an openness on the part of the wine growers to cultivating new, resistant grape varieties that can cope without pesticides. Delinat and its wine growers do everything they can to eschew monoculture and support nature’s cycles. The greater the diversity, the fewer the problems.
THE CIRCULAR BOX
Delinat’s logistics demonstrate that business and ecology can go hand in hand in a well-planned circular economy. Delinat chose Planzer Parcel as the shipping partner for its wine customers. The two companies have been working together ever since we set up Planzer Parcel. We developed a reusable shipping carton together and introduced it in 2019. Since then, Swiss customers have been able to place their empty boxes outside their door every time they are expecting a delivery, and the Planzer Parcel drivers will automatically take them away. It’s working so well that the quota of new boxes has fallen to around half.
Every day, Planzer Parcel delivers several hundred Delinat boxes and brings back just under a dozen of Planzer’s own cage trolleys, filled with empty boxes to be reused by Delinat. The quality of the boxes is flawless even after several uses. The co-developed shipping boxes are sturdy enough to withstand long transport journeys and provide perfect protection for the wine bottles. On average, they can make the journey half a dozen times. Where boxes have to be replaced, it is usually only the external part that is affected. The solid interior parts can be used at least twice as long.
But that’s not all. Delinat wine growers deliver their wines in ‘stacking pallets’, with the bottles stacked one on top of the other and a layer of cardboard between them, holding the necks in place. This creates around 10 times less cardboard waste. The stacking pallets mean that picking, packing and preparing orders for despatch takes around half the time it would if the team had to manually unpack wine boxes.
‘Many of our boxes come back practically as good as new. That’s down to Planzer’s logistics. They take far better care of the consignments than other delivery services.’
Karl Schefer, founder and CEO of Delinat
TRAILBLAZING EFFORTS
Planzer Parcel has helped contribute to Delinat’s circular ambitions through working on the development of the shipping boxes but also through the structure of its entire transport logistics system. Every day, a truck full of Delinat orders is collected from Germany and, following customs clearance, taken to the Planzer railway centre in Pratteln. The truck then returns to Germany with the collected empty boxes – ensuring that, as with collection from the end customer, there is no empty mileage. The following day, Planzer Parcel sets about distributing the orders in Switzerland, using low-carbon rail transport for the brunt of the journey to the destination region. The road fleet is 100% compliant with the Euro 6 emissions standard. All our drivers are trained in environmentally optimised driving behaviour and are so well paid that they take pride in their role delivering to the Delinat connoisseurs.
PIONEERS TOGETHER
The aim of providing efficient logistics solutions is not the only thing that Planzer Parcel and Delinat have in common. The two companies share a very similar ethos. From the outset, both have been committed to ensuring that current and future generations work with rather than against the environment. Both play a significant role in helping raise awareness of the importance of nature. And both are constantly evolving. Delinat’s plans for the future include new pest management solutions, greening strategies and recycled wine bottles. At Planzer, the focus is on issues such as e-mobility and alternative drive technologies for city-centre logistics, rebalancing modal splits in favour of rail transport, using IT to make processes more efficient, etc.
DELIVERIES THAT BRING JOY
The collaboration between Delinat and Planzer Parcel is beneficial to everyone, including the recipients.
- Planzer Parcel offers a series of reliable and flexible delivery options, which are explained in detail on our website.
- It is easy to redirect your delivery or save other delivery options on Planzer Parcel’s online platform.
- At Planzer Parcel, our sophisticated and effective logistics and delivery system bundles orders into logical time slots and prevents empty mileage wherever possible.
- For longer journeys, Planzer Parcel transports the Delinat consignments via eco-friendly rail.
- For deliveries to the door, Planzer Parcel uses delivery vans, but in Zermatt we still rely on Benny the horse.
- Our drivers are given intensive training to ensure that they provide our signature friendly and solution-oriented doorstep delivery service.
- Sustainability, climate protection and quality are among the core values of both partners.
By the way
A Delinat wine subscription doesn’t just represent a treat for the palate but also for nature. And your clear conscience. Both Delinat and Planzer Parcel are making tireless efforts to provide sustainable and innovative solutions that will help preserve the bounty of nature for a long time to come.
