According to the company's annual report for 2025, revenue landed at 18.5 million Swedish krona, an increase of over 900 percent. The growth in revenue is explained by the company investing in marketing and now offering goods from around 70 small-scale producers.
However, while sales increased, operating profit declined. It went from -1.5 million Swedish krona in 2024 to -4.1 million Swedish krona in 2025. The increased loss is due to the company expanding its operations to handle the expansion.
To solve the logistics, they have moved to a larger warehouse and implemented a new system to pack and pick goods more efficiently. In addition, the company has grown from one to four employees during the year, which has increased personnel costs.
In the autumn of 2025, the company also raised 2.9 million Swedish krona in a new issue to replenish the cash reserves and continue development. The rapid growth has, however, presented its challenges, and the company states that popular products have occasionally sold out.
Live Broadcast from the Farm
Now, the company is venturing into physical retail. As a first step, 500 cartons of free-range eggs from Alvas Naturbete have been placed in the ICA store.
Online, Gårdens has unlimited space to tell the story behind each product. But in a store, it's not that simple.
In our e-commerce store, we can use text, images and video to really explain how the food is produced, who the producer is and why the product differs from a more conventional alternative," Alexander Engels told Ehandel.se.
Because purchasing decisions happen faster in a store, the company is testing new methods to capture the customer's attention. Next to the eggs, Gårdens has therefore set up a screen where customers can follow the chickens on the farm in real time.
In a store, you have less time and space to convey the same thing. This is one of the reasons why we are testing the live broadcast from Alvas Naturbete," says Alexander Engels.
On a screen next to the eggs, customers can see the chickens live on the farm. The packaging also features a QR code where you can read more. We simply want to see if we can bring some of the transparency and storytelling that works well online into the physical store environment.
From Home Delivery to Pallet Goods
The step from e-commerce to grocery retail also involves a shift in how the goods are transported. Small farms often experience logistics as an obstacle, something Gårdens has taken on to solve. By selling through retailers, the conditions for transport change.
In e-commerce, we ship many individual orders all the way home to the customer," says Alexander Engels.
To the store, we can instead consolidate the goods with our existing flows and deliver a larger quantity to one place. This also means that we avoid the individual last mile cost for these products.
The evaluation of the project will not only be based on how quickly the cartons leave the shelf. The company is looking for more data points to determine whether the investment should be expanded to more stores in the future.
Sales rate is of course important, but we want to learn more than just how many cartons are sold. We will, among other things, track how much the QR codes on the packaging are scanned. We will also be on site in the store and talk to customers to understand how they reason about the product, the price and the information about how the chickens live," says the CEO, adding:
This is a first fairly small test, so the qualitative feedback is almost as interesting to us as the actual sales figures. We want to understand what works before we decide what the next step will look like.
E-commerce Remains the Core
Despite the success online, it wasn't a given that the company would take the step into physical stores. The digital business was the starting point, but the long-term goal is to reach consumers regardless of platform.
Grocery retail has not been an explicit goal in itself from day one. Our goal has always been to make really good food from small-scale Swedish producers as easy as possible to buy," says Alexander Engels.
E-commerce was the natural place to start because we can gather many producers in one place and at the same time give customers a lot of information about the food and the people behind it. But our mission is actually channel-independent.
Even if the store test goes well, digital sales will continue to drive the business forward in the near future. Grocery retail is seen as a complement, not a replacement.
We certainly hope that grocery retail can grow into a business leg for Gårdens. At the same time, our e-commerce store has had very strong growth in the last two years, so in the short and medium term it will continue to account for the majority of the business and be our biggest focus. What we find most exciting is actually the combination. We believe that physical stores and e-commerce can reinforce each other rather than us having to choose one or the other," concludes Alexander Engels.