Yes Future opened in Barcelona’s Poblenou neighborhood as a bulk food and household products store where customers bring their own containers, fill them from dispensers, and pay by weight. Its founders, Olga Rodriguez and Alejandro Martinez, deliberately designed the store without colorful packaging or individual brands (glass hoppers of pulses and nuts on white walls, Catalan-labeled taps dispensing liquid detergents), so the product itself, not the packaging, is what customers see.
In 2022, the store won the Barcelona Commerce Award for creating an economic model that prioritizes collective wellbeing. It has been working closely with its local municipal government, which has embraced the model as part of Barcelona’s sustainability strategy.
The Design Philosophy
Yes Future’s aesthetic is intentional and it’s a sustainability mechanism. The absence of individual product branding and colorful packaging removes the impulse-buying signals that conventional retail uses to drive unnecessary consumption. When customers see glass containers of bulk pasta rather than individually branded pasta boxes, they tend to buy what they need rather than what the packaging has convinced them they want.
Rodriguez has articulated this explicitly: “We wanted clients to be able to clearly see what they were buying without being lured in by individual envases or tags that encourage impulse buying.” This is anti-persuasion design applied to retail: a notable contrast with conventional retail’s enormous investment in exactly the kind of packaging and display that drives impulse purchasing.
The store sources from small-scale Catalan producers, procuring ingredients directly for quality and traceability. This is local sourcing as both quality and sustainability strategy: shorter supply chains reduce transportation emissions and create direct relationships with producers that support local agricultural economies.
The Partnership Network
Yes Future doesn’t operate in isolation. The store has formed partnerships with a butcher for meat product refills, a bakery selling bulk produce in recyclable paper bags, a chocolate shop, and a beauty center offering eco-options including locally-made solid shampoo bars.
The Reusabol program (where customers pay a small refundable deposit for reusable takeaway containers at partner restaurants) extends the zero-waste principle into food service across multiple Barcelona businesses. This network approach makes zero-waste shopping a neighborhood-scale behavior rather than a single-store specialty.
These partnerships also address the product range limitation that constrains standalone zero-waste stores: no single package-free store can stock everything. By connecting customers to partner businesses with similar values, Yes Future extends its reach into categories (fresh meat, baked goods, beauty products) that its own store format can’t accommodate.
The most important sustainability move Yes Future made wasn’t the bulk bins. It was refusing to use packaging as a marketing tool. When you remove the packaging-as-advertising layer, you change what customers pay for — and you change how much they buy.
What the Barcelona Context Adds
Barcelona’s municipal government has actively embraced Yes Future’s model as part of its urban sustainability strategy. This public sector alignment (rare for independent retail operations) reduces the marketing burden on the store and adds credibility that commercial sustainability claims alone don’t provide.
Spain has historically had lower recycling rates and higher litter rates than Northern European countries. Yes Future represents part of a conscious shift in Spanish retail culture toward packaging reduction and local sourcing that is being encouraged by both bottom-up consumer demand and top-down municipal policy.
For retailers considering zero-waste or reduced-packaging models: Barcelona’s experience suggests that the model becomes more commercially viable when the municipal environment actively supports it: through aligned waste policy, public communication about packaging reduction, and recognition programs like the Commerce Award that create social proof.
P.S. Yes Future’s manifesto, “The Future Is This Way,” is publicly available and functions as one of the more articulate statements of zero-waste retail design philosophy available. Worth reading before designing any package-free retail concept.