We are Oé, the activist wine brand. Vines account for 4% of agriculture and 20% of pesticides. We want to change that. Our organic wines are produced with Oé winemakers. We are the first wine brand to relaunch bottle reuse in France, to move toward zero waste, and to finance regeneration initiatives in the vineyards. It is this great consistency that has made Oé a certified B Corp company since 2017 and a Mission-Driven Company since 2021.
Our mission is to transform agriculture, consumption and business for the benefit of Good.
Goal #1: Transform agriculture
Agriculture is at once responsible for, victim of, and solution to climate change.
Committed to organic farming since 2015, we are now working to go beyond organic thanks to bio-agroecological agriculture or bio-regenerative agriculture which combines both the elimination of synthetic inputs (the famous chemical pesticides) and soil conservation (plant cover, no ploughing) to regenerate common goods : soil, water, air, biodiversity.
Learn more
in detail
The vine
4% of agriculture in France, and 20% of pesticides. Source ADEME.
The social
160,000 farms to be taken over within 3 years and 70,000 jobs to be filled per year.
Employment
Conventional agriculture generates 40% fewer jobs than organic agriculture.
Carbon
Agriculture accounts for 30% of global carbon emissions.
Biodiversity
69% loss of wild vertebrate populations since 1970. Source WWF.
Fresh water
Agriculture accounts for 70% of global freshwater consumption.
Oé buys his first wine estate!
It is located in the Rhône Valley, between Drôme and Vaucluse. It covers 6 hectares and produces wine under the AOP and IGP Côtes-du-Rhône appellations. The estate has been certified organic since 2023.
We want to take our efforts to regenerate living things even further. By becoming a producer, we'll have our feet in the vineyard. And we'll be even closer to nature to gain agility and roll out our action plan for the next five years.
Beyond the agronomic transition of the estate, we want to make it a place open to the outside world with (among other things) the creation of a fun trail in the vineyards to allow visitors to understand the issues of production and transition.
We have other, longer-term projects in the pipeline that will complement this new experience we want to offer you. Stay tuned!
Our concrete actions in the vineyards
We support all our winegrowers in reducing soil work, planting trees and hedges to sequester carbon, promote biodiversity and regenerate the water cycle.
• Soil analysis and 360° diagnosis
• Planting of hedges and trees in agroforestry with a wide variety (apple trees, almond trees, shrubs and plants): more than 1150 meters of hedges in agroforestry with 695 plants and 30 different varieties of apple trees, almond trees, shrubs and plants
• Installation of nesting boxes : more than thirty nesting boxes for birds and around ten bat nesting boxes
• Creation of a sheepfold with 5 Landes sheep and 10 Pyrenean goats recommended by the Conservatoire des breeds d’Aquitaine.
At the beginning of 2024, we purchased our first estate near Avignon, Domaine Oé de la Chapelle Saint-Pierre. We'll tell you more soon!
The sequel...
Today, our main challenge is to move faster and stronger in the regeneration of the vines to make it part of the solution to the challenges we face.
• Support the bio-regenerative transition of our estate and winegrowers.
• Involve customers and public partners in financing these regeneration actions.
• Support the social transition of vineyards : generational renewal, training, installation of young winegrowers, professional integration, etc.
• Adapting vines to climate change in highly exposed areas, by 2050.
• Document what we do in open-source to share our best practices and mistakes.
We have big ambitions for 5 years: 150,000 tonnes of CO2 sequestered, 60,000 metres of hedges planted and 200 winegrowers trained!
Learn more about the regenerative offer
Objective #2: Transform consumption
We're working on several aspects of consumption through our actions to reuse and eliminate capsules, avoid and reduce waste, measure, act, and advocate. We're sharing all our concrete actions with you—let's get started!
Learn more about our carbon footprint
in detail
Reuse
79% less greenhouse gases, 76% less energy, and 51% less water than recycling a bottle (benefit of reuse compared to recycling after 20 washes). Recycling a glass bottle is better than doing nothing. However, the recycling industry operates non-stop with furnaces running 24/7 at 1500°C. A game-changer in terms of ecology!
Logistics
A traditional wine pallet consists of 125 boxes, 750 bottle caps, 100 meters of tape, and 35 meters of plastic film. We have the solution to avoid all this!
Plastic
By 2050, all marine animals will be eating plastic; 5 trillion pieces of plastic are already floating in our oceans; and 73% of beach litter worldwide contains plastic. The minimum lifespan of plastic is estimated at 450 years. That's huge, and we want to change that!
Reuse.
71% of our bottles sold to Cafés-Hotels-Restaurants go into the reuse circuit and 26% of our bottles sold in total go into the reuse circuit.
The room for improvement is enormous, as are the challenges when we know that reuse saves 79% of greenhouse gases, 76% of energy and 51% of water compared to a recycled bottle! However, this figure is already good knowing that we were not reusing more than 1% of our bottles when we started this project in 2020...
We're investing in bottle reuse. Reusable bottles are heavier than recyclable ones and therefore more expensive. Thanks to this investment, we've been campaigning to make wine bottle reuse possible in France since early 2020.
Our labels are recycled and water-soluble, micro-perforated and with bird-shaped cutouts to allow water to pass through better during washing for reuse. The ink is recycled or food-grade.
Learn more about reuse
Go zero waste.
Avoiding and reducing waste: We're reducing the use of single-use plastics in our warehouse, particularly through zero-waste logistics. A zero-waste pallet requires 125 boxes, 750 bottle caps, 35 meters of plastic film, and about 100 meters of tape less than a traditional pallet.
Eliminate capsules: Capsules represent 3g of waste. Insignificant, except when you consider the wine market, which will represent more than 33 billion bottles sold worldwide in 2022. By eliminating capsules, we'll help avoid the production of 70,000 tons of waste. You can imagine why we're eager to see a law passed on this issue to eventually ban it.
Learn more about the impact of wine capsules
Measure, act & campaign!
51% of our carbon footprint is linked to our wine bottles. Both the contents and the container. The impact of a dark bottle is greater than a clear one. Between 65 and 80% of recycled glass is used to recycle bottles. A clear bottle, on the other hand, is made from more than 80% new raw material, silica, which is becoming increasingly rare.
Across our entire production, we have 61% green bottles and 39% transparent bottles. And since it's difficult to act without measuring, we're doing a new carbon footprint in 2024 and we're even launching a life cycle analysis (LCA) .
We publish our progress through white papers . We speak out to discuss our progress. We implement our progress with our partners and share it through this impact report. We participate in advocacy actions to transform consumption and avoid the production of unnecessary waste.
Learn more about our carbon footprint Learn more about zero waste logistics
In short, we raise awareness in our communities about bottle reuse, biodiversity preservation, and global warming on our networks. We go a step further by also doing this during speaking engagements with the B Corp , Mouvement Impact France , Ticket for Change movements and also within the Consigne Network or the Engagé à Lyon label.
The sequel...
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Accelerate on the instruction
We can still go further, in particular by providing better support to large supermarkets and large groups... Because even if things are moving forward, for example for Carrefour and its own deposit system or Chapoutier which cuts the capsules on its bottles.
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Deliver sustainably
Barges : finding alternatives to truck delivery
Export : we have a lot of questions, we are trying to deliver by sail to the USA!
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What about sobriety?
And if we're so concerned about zero waste and limiting our impact, it's because the world needs it. We can't avoid the issue of over-communication and restraint in alcohol consumption, for example.
Regenerating and transforming the company requires us to reject certain things. This means, for example: no alcohol-related posts during Dry January and the summer holidays. No Black Friday. Christmas holidays blocked for everyone. And even more tomorrow.
Goal #3: Transform the business
We're doing everything we can to create a new business model that's more streamlined, transparent, inclusive, and joyful. And it's not so easy to ask consumers to change. We can raise awareness, but change will be faster and more radical if it comes from businesses. So, here's how we're doing it.
in detail
Resources are running out
With 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries exceeded, maximizing financial profit alone seems a little outdated...
The desire for another model
1/4 of French workers feel professional exhaustion.
Lack of meaning
12% of French people are suffering from burnout.
Transparency & balance
Transparent salary scales, financial reports accessible to all and presented at each new season. Oé is a signatory of the Parental Challenge, offers teleworking, RTTs, and more. It also creates a framework of trust to find a work/life balance.
Inclusion
We hire people with disabilities, build relationships, and develop partnerships with great brands and committed artists. We work with ESATs (Employment Assistance Services)...
Joy
The team's Fx organizes the team hike every year in June, we also do the grape harvest in September, and a " special day " in January (our type of seminar) to cultivate joy.
Learn more about our new business model
Consistency
Oé has its cash in an ethical bank, uses a renewable energy supplier, and offers only 100% vegetarian team meals...
Governance and subsidiarity
Each election is without a candidate, working circles are set up on different subjects to promote collective decisions.
Learn moreThe sequel: the company of tomorrow, through our prism...
Learn more-
Living Accounting
We're starting to look into how to add other non-financial elements to our accounting. How to include living organisms in our figures, including everything we regenerate in the vineyards. For now, we're having trouble doing this because we don't yet have the firepower to devote much time to these topics. However, it's a goal we'd like to achieve within the next three years.
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4-day week
We would also like to implement a 4-day week or at least a 4 and a half day week in the next 3 years to give the team more time to spend with their families, to give time to associations that need it, to do sports, to take care of themselves, etc. For the moment, we cannot yet afford to reduce the pace. But the subject is definitely on the table ;)
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Small tree, big tree
We draw inspiration from the way forests function to create a network of cooperation with all our stakeholders. This is the case when we work collectively to deploy the deposit system or when our clients (think of the Bertrand Group) finance the regeneration of the vines themselves!
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Regenerative business
Faced with the surpassing of planetary boundaries and the challenges of social justice, Oé aims to become a company that has more positive than negative impacts on the environment and society through an alliance with living things and a transformation of our economic model. To learn more about this topic, we invite you to learn about the Business Climate Convention and read this article !
B CORP & the committed movements
Oé has been B Corp certified since 2017. We went from 82 to
102.3 points. We've also been a mission-driven company since June 2021. Oé is part of the Impact France Movement, which can be compared to a MEDEF (French employers' association) that upholds true environmental and societal values.