Natreco

Natreco is the UK's only online marketplace dedicated to specialty products such as #ORGANIC, #VEGAN, #GLUTEN FREE and #DAIRY FREE products. We also bring you top quality content from nutritionists and bloggers who are experts in their field.

When our founder Gary Collins and his wife visited Borneo for their honeymoon in 2014 he was expecting the trip to be a relaxing holiday spent visiting the island’s exciting jungles and beaches. The highlight of the trip however, a trek to see the country’s monkeys and Orangutans, had a profound effect on Gary, which led to him quitting his job back home and setting up Natreco.

The jungle trek to visit the Orangutans was everything Gary had hoped it would be and he and his wife spent over an hour watching the beautiful animals frolicking in their natural habitat. When the couple left the jungle, and caught a small plane back to the village they were staying in, they were in for a surprise they hadn’t expected however. As they flew over the jungle, just a few miles from where they had seen the primates, they were confronted with mile upon mile of burnt down and smouldering trees where huge swathes of jungle had been cleared for palm oil plantations. Their pilot explained that nearly 80% percent of the jungle in the country had now been lost to logging or palm oil plantations and that as a result the primates of the island were in serious trouble.

The mood in the plane quickly became sombre as Gary realised that in just a few years the sight he had just witnessed could be a thing of the past.

Gary, already an animal lover and vegetarian, made the decision there and then not to use palm oil again. Once he got back to the UK he realised that cutting palm oil out of his life was going to be harder than he’d first thought. He discovered palm oil was found in nearly half of all products on our supermarket shelves, ranging from ice cream to shampoo, and it was almost impossible to avoid in everyday life; so he began a search to find alternatives. Gary started compiling a list of products and in the process realised there must be other people with a similar mind set to his, who would also want to avoid palm oil, and so the seeds of a business plan were sewn.

Gary’s vision was to provide an online store which would sell only palm oil free products, or those that used sustainably sourced palm oil, and at the same time provide a one stop shop for speciality products such as organic, vegan and other free from products, where users can filter their shop depending on their own retail principles, such as ‘biodegradable’, ‘fairtrade’, or ‘locally sourced’