A few personal words from the founder

"How did you come up with SmacoGlas?"

I get asked that question a lot. The answer is very simple: Just like every other inventor came up with an idea: I had a problem and needed a solution!

As a working mother of three children, the weekly shopping was a challenge for me every week: How was I supposed to fit all the groceries into the fridge?! And preferably in a way that I could still find some of them. I found out many times that my Tetris experience paid off (contrary to what my mother thought at the time 😉). But it wasn't satisfactory.

I actually had 5 big problems:

1. Order and Space

For a family of five, there simply wasn't enough space in the fridge to neatly store the fresh food, cold cuts and cheese for a whole week. Boxes available on the market weren't really a solution (I'd tried a number of them over the years), because they were all much too high and too large. So I regularly stored one thing in a neatly organized manner: lots of air! And that was exactly the space I urgently needed for food.

Shopping more often was not a practical solution on a regular basis because I simply didn't have the time or the nerves between work, school, kindergarten, sports clubs, cooking and whatever else came up.

2. Appetite and hygiene

I tried countless plastic cold cuts boxes because they were at least stackable. Almost all of them were far too high, which meant I wasted a lot of space. There wasn't a single system that allowed me to have different heights. So the box was too flat for a piece of cheese and far too high for 100 grams of salami. In the end, they spent most of their lives in the cupboard.

I don't think plastic is particularly attractive or high-quality, even when it's new. As soon as the cold cuts boxes were washed in the dishwasher a few times, they weren't just no longer attractive, they were downright unappetizing because they became cracked and milky. And woe betide anyone who accidentally puts a pot with leftover tomato sauce in the same wash cycle! They'll then have completely individual orange to pink colored unique items.

The worst thing for me, however, was that after 5 days at the most, I had slimy, greasy cold cuts and cheese that was floating in condensation! 🤢 Buying the right amount of cold cuts without having to throw a lot away was a challenge every week. This week, tractor sausage was the hit, the next week, no one liked it!

And after rinsing the plastic containers a few times, even the cold cuts tasted like plastic... Enjoy your meal! 🤔

3. Glass: Hygienic but impractical

So, after finally banishing plastic boxes from my fridge, I bought glass boxes. Has anyone ever noticed how impractical even glass boxes are, which are advertised as being perfect for cold cuts?

Glass boxes all have one thing in common: they are not really square, but rather round and square. And they are all conical, meaning they are wider at the top than at the bottom. This means you need a lid to be able to stack the containers on top of each other, which I don't think is stackable.

Because glass bowls are all conical and much too high to store small amounts of cold cuts, I always had to put different types of cheese or cold cuts in a glass container, otherwise everything wouldn't have fit in the fridge. But I like my fresh liver sausage when it tastes like liver sausage and not like Serrano ham. 😒

And since a hodgepodge of cold cuts in a glass jar on the table is not really appetizing, I stood in the kitchen every Saturday and Sunday morning and arranged the cold cuts on the plate. My husband, in turn, did not find this appetizing, since the cold cuts warmed up more quickly and he kept touching them with every breakfast (even if only with a fork).

4. I wanted to make it easier

I found the week really exhausting enough. No, I'm not complaining. But juggling work, children, housework, animals, etc. is just exhausting. I still love it today, but it was also exhausting.

That's why I love the weekends when we take a more relaxed approach to everything, when everything isn't scheduled, when you can stay seated if you're having funny, interesting or even exciting conversations.

But for me, who likes to have a visually appetizing breakfast, that meant work preparing the food beforehand and work putting it away afterwards. After a few years, I just didn't feel like doing that anymore.

5. More and more packaging

It felt like the pile of packaging waste was getting bigger with every weekly shopping trip. It didn't matter whether I bought cold cuts and cheese fresh from the service counter or pre-packaged from the refrigerated counter. This amount annoyed me not only because it was unnecessarily large, but also because it was a lot of work. But I simply had no other option than to buy packaged cold cuts:

Taking plastic containers to the butcher to save on plastic packaging didn't make sense to me, especially since the cold cuts would then taste of plastic even more quickly. Butchers weren't exactly thrilled about the poor hygiene of plastic containers either.

Glass boxes were more hygienic. But I would have had to either put all the goods in one box (delicious Serrano liver sausage) or carry a whole bag full of glass containers just for a few hundred grams of cold cuts.

Admittedly, the problem didn't dominate my everyday life... but with each passing week, the issue annoyed me more and more, sometimes more, sometimes less. So I jumped from one interim solution to another and kept checking in every language imaginable in the world to see if anyone had already found a solution to my ever-growing problem.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing!

I just wanted a simple, square glass bowl that could be stacked on top of each other like plastic boxes can. It couldn't be impossible!

I asked myself: Am I the only one who:

• don't want to go to the butcher with a plastic container to save plastic?
• Don't want to store food in plastic?
• Are you concerned about the release of microplastics every time you wash the dishes?
• plastic bowls are not visually appealing?
• finds existing glass bowls impractical?
• want to prepare an appealing breakfast for your family on the weekend without having to spend a long time preparing it?
• want to present high-quality food in a high-quality manner?

After almost 10 years of searching, I've made the decision: I'm going to have the boxes made to measure! It can't be that difficult!

Until then, I was convinced that I was alone in the world with my little problems. However, the more I talked about it, the more I realized that I was by no means alone. And so the idea of ​​"I'll have 10 bowls made for me" grew into SmacoGlas .

Every time I took a step forward, new things came up that I had to consider and I spent many sleepless nights wondering: Isn't the shoe a little too big for me? But no matter how scared I was of taking the step, I always fell asleep thinking: SmacoGlas is just too good not to risk it!

And so, after more than a year of thinking, planning and working, I was faced with the decision: quit or start a business? So I started a business!

Even though I still have a long way to go until SmacoGlas is complete with all sizes and I have yet to implement many of my ideas, my deepest conviction is that I have found a high-quality and sustainable solution with SmacoGlas.

Just as my goal is only the best, I want to enable our customers to live a beautiful, sustainable and uncomplicated life with SmacoGlas products, our service and our highest level of performance. And the feedback from my customers shows me that it was the right step to take!

Warm greetings from the Flensburg Fjord,

Janine Krause