Archive for the ‘Grocery Stores’ Category

Can you afford to buy local?

Monday, June 28th, 2010

I am a firm believer in supporting the local economy.  I also believe in supporting small business.  Being sustainable means taking a long term look at the decisions that we make and making choices that best benefit ourselves, our communities and our planet.  But can we always afford to make the best choices?

There have been plenty of studies that tell us that consumers prefer to buy green products.  They want locally made, locally sources environmentally friendly goods.  Unfortunately, when it comes down to it, they are less likely to pay much of a premium for these products.  I can relate.  The last year has not been kind to many people.  The downturn in the economy has been difficult at best and devastating at worst.  Many people I know still have not returned to work.  When times are tight, it is harder to remain steadfast in your resolve.  We are no exception.  When making our buying decisions, We still  buy most of our fresh foods at farmers markets, but a bigger part of my food budget is going to places like Deals and Wal Mart, as we struggle to stretch those dollars whenever we can.  I still insist on toilet tissue made from recycled paper.  But we have a small household with no children, and we need less in the way of clothes and other goods.

A friend of mine shared the following story with me:

I thought of you yesterday and the LED buying situation in Cleveland. I started painting my son’s room. When I went to get the paint, I first went to Sherwin Williams… A gallon of paint there is $32. I was told that I couldn’t get the dark blue color I wanted in the zero VOC or any other dark blue shade for that matter.  When I was in Lowe’s the zero VOC was $20 and I could get any shade I wanted. My budget for this room was tight, so even though I wanted to buy local, it just wasn’t workable!
Just a little anecdote I thought I’d share with you – it’s much more understandable to me now on this level! :)

I do not want to get into the debate of quality versus quantity.  The truth is, when times are tight, making the decision to buy local, buy more environmentally friendly, or even buying more nutritional becomes harder and harder to do.  Compound that with the fact that much of our local food is not sold in any local markets, and that a majority of the produce sold at the West Side Market comes from the same suppliers as Giant Eagle.  Top it off with the loss of manufacturing in the region and you are left with relatively few local goods to buy to support the local economy.  (sorry American Greetings and Bonnie Bell, but I stopped sending paper cards a few years ago, and I found that lip gloss doesn’t suit me!)When times are good, it is easy to decide to spend an extra 10% or more on better ingredients and goods from local producers.  When times are tough, however, the decisions get even tougher.  I would prefer to shop at Heinen’s, Acme, or another local food store, but If I were to drive the 5-10 miles or more to support local, the trade off is in emissions as I am blocks from Steelyard Commons.

So, how do you make YOUR buying decisions?  Do you have certain items that you insist must be local or eco-friendly?  What about the stores that you choose to support?

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Help Create the West Side Food Co-op…

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

A food co-op is a member owned grocery store. There are a number of different styles of food co-ops, but all of them share common values of group management and decision making, social responsibility, and equality. Most food co-ops strive to follow the Seven Cooperative Principles, which include:

• Voluntary & Open Membership
• Democratic Member Control
• Economic Participation
• Autonomy & Independence
• Education, Training & Information
• Cooperation among Cooperatives
• Concern for the Community

Eastsiders have been blessed with a food co op for many years.  The co op on Euclid just east of University Circle has long been a successful shopping destination for lovers of local and natural foods.  Unfortunately, it is quite a schlep for those of us “westies.”  Part of building a greener more sustainable city is to strengthen our neighborhoods.  Dense urban neighborhoods that provide more amenities within a small area are vital to reducing our city’s carbon footprint and to attracting new residents and new business to the region.  Enter the West Side Food Co op.

This concept was borne of a discussion between residents of Cleveland’s Detroit Shoreway neighborhood.  After several informal talks, the idea was tabled for several months.  However, it has come back and with a vengeance.  Now boasting a strong core of potential members and a “steering” committee that is dedicated to making this dream a reality, the West Side Food Co op is getting serious.  Monthly meetings are well attended and things are progressing pretty close to schedule.  By-laws and articles of incorporation are now in the works and things are getting ready to move to a new stage.  So, how can you help?

Before the steps can be taken to obtain funding and to move to the next stage, it is imperative to prove that there is a need and a desire for a food cooperative on Cleveland’s west side.  To achieve that end, they have produced a simple survey.  Not only will you help to show how much excitement there is for this project, but it will also help steer the direction of the plan and help to determine product selection within the store.  It may also steer the physical location of the store location.  The survey itself takes only a few minutes to complete.  I filled it out while sitting at a meeting on my cell phone.  Although the survey is simple, it is vital to the progression of this project.  Additionally, there will be folks out and about in west side neighborhoods, going door to door to get more survey results.  Please take a couple of minutes to answer the questions and help form a brick and mortar location for a food co op.  If you would like to help get some surveys filled out amongst your friends and neighbors, just drop me an email at robert@thegldc.com and I will connect you with the canvas coordinators.

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Wal-Mart, Starbucks, et al.

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

A lot of people hate Wal-Mart for various reasons.  I understand that.  They were famous for civil-rights violations, racism, gender bias, and other unfortunate blights under the direct orders of perma-southerner founder Sam Walton.  After his death and a major regime change, the company started cleaning up its act.  But truly, these things are not the main reason people hate Wal-Mart.

For years the mega-store would come into a small town, build their gargantuan behemoth, sell at rock-bottom prices which would then force little mom & pop operations to go belly-up.  So evil.  Although this seems to be the epitome of business models celebrated in the eighties, the constant loss of smaller venues began to rattle people, to their core.  Grass roots action groups formed and many citizens started to gather to protest at potential building sites, saying “not in our town, Wal-Mart!”  And good for them; this is America and what’s more American than protesting?

Let me shed some personal insight into how Wal-Mart and their corporate brethren choses potential sites.  In the early eighties I worked for PayLess Drug Stores, the largest independently owned and operated drug store chain in the U.S. at the time (it has since been swallowed up by Rite Aid).  I worked in the construction/real estate development department.  The modus operandi for the development department was to scout out a town, suss out how many operating pharmacies are located there and then start drawing lines to and from each one.  At each intersection of lines, property was scouted to build a new strip mall, usually featuring a local grocery store alongside the drug store, but many times it only had a drug store anchor.  Then a slick salesperson would sidle up to one of the pharmacists at one of the local drug stores; maybe take them to lunch or dinner; buy them some gifts and tell them how great working for PayLess would be.  You see, a state only issues so many pharmacy licenses per year, and it’s easier to get an already licensed pharamacist to come to work for your store.  Once the pharmacist has taken the bait, then you can build your store with complete confidence the other store will have to close.  You can’t call yourself a drugstore if you don’t have a licensed pharacist on site.  Same Evil as Wal-Mart.

Later in my career I designed a grocery store for a woman who had just stepped down as the head of real estate development for Starbucks.  Guess what story she told me?  Starbucks would send out scouts into a neighborhood to see how well other coffee shops were doing.  Once they drew their connecting lines, they’d know just where a new store could be located.  If the existing shops were too far apart, Starbucks may even try to take over the existing stores instead of locating between them.  Pure evil, huh?

A person recently suggested we shop at Target instead of Wal-Mart.  As SNL’s Seth and Amy used to say, “Really?”  Here’s another personal tale:  A few years ago I was working for an architecture firm who was doing a design for a strip center in Chili, New York (pronounced Shy-Lye).  The center was going to be placed on a wetlands, and the developer was willing to purchase double the amount of replacement land that would then be converted into wetlands.  Don’t get me started about whether or not newly created wetlands are as affective as existing ones.  This story is really about how the residents of Chili went to the first public meeting and asked their councilpersons why a this location was so special; couldn’t the center be placed closer to town so the scenic wilderness and wetlands could be preserved?.  The representative from Target announced clearly (and I wildly paraphrase): “don’t mess with us or you won’t get a Target in your town at all!”  To which the citizens of Chili simply said, “fine, we don’t want you anyway.”  Supposedly this surprised and angered Target, but to my knowledge no Target has been built in Chili, New York to date.  I don’t know if Home Depot, who was also to be in this center shared a similar fate.

I guess the moral of these stories is that pretty much all big corporation with ideas of expanding into untapped territories follow the same path that Wal-Mart is constantly blamed for.  Does it make it right?  I don’t know.  Perhaps the little mom & pop stores who have all that quaintness and down-home good feeling are actually guilty of overcharging their customers so they just can’t compete with the buying power of a mega-chain.  Maybe we shouldn’t be patronizing any chain at all?

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Milk Milk Everywhere!

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

The dictionary describes the work “milk” as both a noun and a verb (to milk). One of the definitions is “any liquid resembling this [the liquid secreted by female mammals] as the liquid within a coconut, the juice or sap of certain plants [like the thistle], or various pharmaceutical preparations [i.e.: milk of magnesia]. Some of the other definitions is “to exploit: the swindler milked her of all her savings”, or “to extract such as in: He’s good at milking laughs from the audience”.
Now the National Milk Producers Federation is petitioning the FDA for a second time to ban all other products from using the term milk. Their targets are products like soy milk, almond milk, etc. The first time they tried this back in 2000, the FDA didn’t go for it, but that was before producers started branding things soy cheese, “r”ice cream and even non-dairy yogurt.
In a press release from the NMPF, it’s President and CEO Jerry Kozak says: “The FDA has allowed the meaning of ‘milk’ to be watered down to the point where many products that use the term have never seen the inside of a barn.” The NMPF is trying to correct the “misappropriation of dairy terminology on imitation milk products.” He goes on to state: “You don’t got milk if it comes from a hemp plant, you can’t say cheese if it’s made from rice, and faux yogurt can’t be made from soy and still be called yogurt,” says Kozak.
According to Bob Vosburgh with SuperMarket News, “The crux of the NMPF argument is that, by using dairy terminology, non-dairy alternatives are positioning themselves as equivalents when, in fact, they contain vastly different ingredients and vary widely in nutritional value.”
I’ve always had a difficult time with the branding of words instead of names. It’s alright to copyright or trademark a name like “Brandy’s Coffee House”, but it agitates me when someone trademarks the word “Boulongerie” a common French word meaning “bakery”. So can the NMPF ‘trademark’ the word Milk? If they won would the award winning Sean Penn movie have to choose a different name? Would comedians no longer be milking audiences or would swindlers no longer be milking savings? Would Milk of Magnesia now have to be called Opaque Liquid of Magnesia?
Perhaps the meat industry will have to go after “nut meats” or “mince meat pie”, or maybe, finally the grocery produce industry will finally resolve that age old question of whether a tomato is a vegetable or a fruit.

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Paper, plastic, or other…what does it take to reduce plastic bags?

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

It has been over a year since I brought a plastic bag into the house, I think. It started out kind of difficult. I often forgot the reusable bags in the car or the house. Then I took on a new strategy. I store all the reusable bags in the trunk of the car. If I ever stop somewhere and forget to take one in, I simply ask not to give me a bag and I bag my own in the actual trunk. It took a little while, but I have completely adjusted and no paper, no plastic. It has gotten me to think hard on the daily down and dirty of bags, plastics, packaging and waste. I started with just 3 reusable bags and a giant sack of plastic bags left over from the store. I now have a host a bags, and I have never purchased a single one. But before i began my quest to eliminate plastic bags from my life, I often had the discussion of which is better, paper or plastic? Plastic is bad, but paper requires trees and energy, so not a perfect solution. One of the blogs I read is called Tomato Talk and is a part of the Earth Fare Supermarket chain website.

Earth Fare just announced that we’re eliminating plastic bags from our stores.

And, many of you have responded to this with, “Why plastic bags and not paper bags?” Here at Earth Fare, we know that the paper versus plastic debate is bound to rage on for many years to come. But, we felt like we needed to take a stand.

So, here’s why Earth Fare has decided to boot plastic over its paper counterparts.

1.) Plastic bags can take over 1,000 years to biodegrade. Paper only takes two to three weeks to biodegrade in a warm landfill.

2.) Only 13% of plastic bags are ever recycled. OVER 56% of paper bags are reused or recycled.

3.) Plastic bags are made of petroleum and natural gas, both NON-renewable resources. Like plastic bags, paper bags do require energy in production. But, two-thirds of that energy is RENEWABLE ENERGY. Creating paper bags is a carbon neutral process

4.) Don’t be fooled. Paper is a renewable resource! The Society of American Foresters have reported that there are more trees now that there was 100 years ago. The paper and forest products industries plant more than three times the number of trees that they harvest.

Finally, and most importantly, paper bags are safer for animals than plastic bags. How often have you heard of a wild animal getting caught in a paper bag or dying from eating one? NEVER. But, this is exactly what happens when plastic bags get picked up by wildlife, especially birds and marine wildlife. They eat it. They feed it to their young. They die from it.

Even better of course is to spend a little cash and pick up a reusable bag next time you go shopping. My first bags are still going strong and I got them in the summer of 2007. And having worked in a grocery store, I can tell you, I pack them FULL!

The great bag debate has been going on for sometime. In some areas of the world plastic shopping bags are banned. In others, there is a nickel charge for a bag. What good is a nickel? Quite a lot apparently. When you give a nickel discount for each bag you bring in you see a lot more reused bags of all sorts. But when you make it a mandatory charge for each bag, then you you will really see behavior change. I am constantly amazed by the poor quality of bags and bagging services in this part of the country. In Oregon, the bags were of better quality and many stores used photo degradable bags, bags that broke down in the sun, so the errant bag caught in a tree or whirling around the freeway would break down on their own. Still, cashiers, baggers and consumers were all conscious of how much each bag could hold and were trained to fill each bag to its proper capacity. Shopping at most any Cleveland area grocery store and you are likely to receive a separate bag for eggs, as separate bag for bread, a limit of about 4 jars or cans to a bag (and often double bagged at that), and your milk-that comes in a jug with its own handle-will get a double bag as well. I insisted on bagging my own groceries, as I was been overwhelmed by a sea of plastic bags. Cashiers used to insist that their bags were just not very strong. I tried the “if you told the manager to buy better bags you would use less” comment more than once, but finally got tired of the blank stare from dead eyes that said, “whatever, weirdo.”

It is apparent that it is up to consumers to make the right moves, and if we do not, then legislature will have to do it for us. In Washington DC, a 5 cent bag tax was implemented on all plastic bags. That means grocery, hardware, drug stores-even restaurants like Subway started adding a nickel to every purchase that used a bag. That means that every time you shop there, you are confronted with your own use, your own waste, and a decision that goes right to your pocket. The result? Consumers hate taxes and will do anything to avoid them. In DC, stores averaged about 22 1/2 MILLION plastic bags a month-each and every month. Enter the New Year’s Bag Tax, and in just short month, bag usage went gone down to a mere 3 million. If these results stay static, then this legislation means that the DC area could reduce the waste of its city by over 230 million plastic bags. What about all those nickels that are collected? That tax is earmarked for environmental causes, starting with the clean up of the DC rivers. By these numbers that is 36 million dollars to be used by those most polluting the environment to clean it up. Sounds fair to me.

What will it take for you to eliminate YOUR plastic bags.

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Local food is now more local

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

Today, March 7, was the soft opening of the new Central Community Co-op.  Started as a class research project by Tri-C (Cuyahoga Community College) students, the new Co-op will provide local residents with fresh fruits and vegetables from Tri-C’s recreation Center.  They will also provide access to free nutritional education classes.

This all started because Tri-C decided to offer a “Special Topics” class focused on nutrition.  The class research assignment got the students thinking about ‘food deserts’ and the lack of good nutritional options in the area. 

The project is starting out small, but they plan to expand over the coming months.  I am sure as word spreads, this program will become more and more popular! 

Cleveland is so cool.

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More LEED grocery stores opening.

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Hy-Vee, Inc. will begin construction on a 64,000-square-foot replacement store this spring in Fairfield, Iowa, marking the company’s second store built in accordance with LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification standards. The West Des Moines, Iowa-based grocer opened its first LEED-eligible retail store in Madison, Wis., last October.

This story is from Progressive Grocer and can be read in full on their site.

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The softening Evil Giant?

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

I was once a Wal-Mart basher. Under the original CEO and Founder Sam Wall, all sorts of injustices were propagated ranging from outright racism, discrimination, unfair treatment of employees, and of course bullying. Simply by locating a Wal-Mart in a neighborhood supposedly destroys countless mom & pop stores by providing extremely low price wares. Wal-Mart’s buying power, due to it’s immense size, is equally immense. There’s just no way a mom & pop store can compete with such power.

Lately though, now that the employee & discrimination lawsuits have been settled, and the ultra-religious-yet-inexplicaby-tyrannical-Sam Wall has passed, the lumbering giant has begun to soften and become a bit more responsible to the world it resides in.

First, there’s the energy saving. Wal-Marts across the world are being celebrated because they have become very green when it comes to cutting down on their energy use. Detractors point to the huge dollar savings this behemoth gains when it lowers its energy cost, but I’ll give Wal-Mart the benefit of the doubt here. Sure they are saving money, huge, huge amounts of money, but the new regime is doing other things that aren’t such money-saving-ideas. And, we must remember, Sam Wall never implemented any of these energy saving concepts.

You may have seen in the local news that Wal-Mart has now decided, all of its private label eggs will from now on be cage-free. Why is this a big deal? Wal-Mart sells 30% of all the retail food in the United States. Let that number sink in.  One third of all the food sold in the U.S. at retail is from a Wal-Mart.  The farms who supply the private label eggs have to completely revamp their systems or risk losing the business.  If the farms also supply eggs to other stores, then suddenly we’re going to be seeing more and more cage-free eggs on other store shelves.   Last November the Humane Society of the United States filed a shareholder resolution to Wal-Mart, demanding to know what steps the retailer was taking to move toward cage-free eggs.  The HSUS has now removed that resolution in light of the news.

The March issue of The Atlantic claims that a comparison of the basic offerings at Whole Foods Markets are virtually the same as Wal-Mart’s produce department.  Wal-Mart has also implemented a chain-wide mandate called “heritage agriculture” to buy more and more produce from local sources as part of its overall plan for sustainability and social consciousness.

Now consider this phenomenon: according to Bob Vosburgh of Supermarket News, a recent study by two independent professors found that:

“the arrival of a Wal-Mart Supercenter into a low-income area has a beneficial impact on eating habits, because fresh produce becomes less expensive. The authors cite data from studies showing that, even after accounting for discount cards and sales, Wal-Mart maintains a price advantage of 8%-27% on various food items. [They] estimate that competing supermarkets reduce their prices by 1% – 1.2% after the entry of a Wal-Mart Supercenter into the area.”

Now surely these lower prices may have a negative impact on the margins of a mom & pop store, but in food deserts where low-income families have been forced to get their daily groceries from outrageously high priced (and low health) convenience stores, this should be good news.

So maybe, just maybe, with the dictator gone, this evil giant is softening and becoming a kinder, gentler giant.

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Where to spend your money…

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

I sometimes miss the great competition that is the grocery industry of the west coast.  Among other things, innovation and customer service are pushed to the limits when there are more people vying for your basic dollar.  In Cleveland, we have seen very little of this.  With the closing of Tops, and other smaller chains, there is little incentive for companies to give back or to be invested in their communities.  Last year, Giant Eagle built a nice big store on 117th, but I believe they went just over the line into Lakewood, leaving two empty stores in the wake of this move.  No commitment to the community.  What will fill these big empty storefronts remains to be seen.  Perhaps we could beg a company like Safeway to show Cleveland how it is done.  Check out their Corporate Social Responsibility video below.  In all fairness and full disclosure, I want to say that we have done some work for Safeway.  That being said, it has little to do with the great things that they are doing.

Part of the problem with the world is that we put too much emphasis on profits and not people. Safeway is one of the largest retailers in the world. They are an example of how you can both make money and do good things.

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Foodies for kids…Koodies!

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

I was just turned on to a new website.  It is called Koodies.  Koodies is a play on kids and foodies and it is the brainchild of Supermarket Guru Phil Lambert.  Lambert was realizing that as the world seems to be spinning faster, less and less parents are cooking at home.  When they do cook, they have less time to include the kids.  The result is that even less children are learning how to cook.

What’s the big deal?  We are already a nation that has a huge problem with childhood obesity and diabetes.  Not knowing what is in the foods that we eat is part of this issue.   So kids (and many of their parents), do not understand that a McDonald’s lunch has between 30 and 50 grams of fat.  Hell, many do not realize that you need to even worry about how much fat we consume.  We also have very little connection to the food that we eat.  People do not realize how food is grown, what it takes to produce it, and how tenuous our system is.  Without our connection to the products that we consume, how can we expect anyone to care about changing the system.

So enter Phil Lambert and his new interactive community called Koodies.  Loaded with videos like “Harry Makes Alfredo Sauce” and “Simple Fruit Tart.”  You can share recipes, see pictures of food and other kids, and learn about things like kumquats.  You can even win an iPod nano.  This is an interactive community so you can not just learn from experts, but also from other parents and kids.  This is a chance for you to teach and learn with your kids.  Lambert realizes that the kids of today are the consumers of tomorrow.  In order to make the next generation less dependent on restaurants and more reliant on themselves, and to keep the art of cooking at home alive, we need to engage children now.  I encourage you to all check it out and see how you can make a connection with your kids (or even your grandkids).

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