Monday, January 25, 2016

Rainbow Grocery Experience

First off, apologies of the lack of posting, things have been crazy for the past six months.

Anyway, the other day on my wonderfully curated Facebook feed (no really, 90% of the ads that I see are actually relevant to my interests) I saw an ad for an article regarding how an NYU student was able to eliminate most of her waste. Clicking through on the article, there was a video of her describing her process and showing how she was able to fit all the waste that she had generated over the past two years in one mason jar. Which is amazing. The amount of garbage I generate on a daily basis could not fit into a mason jar. And so I decided to read some of her tips on how to cut down on waste.

One thing she mentioned was trying to purchase things in bulk (pasta, lentils, etc) because a lot of stores that sell things in bulk allow you to bring your own containers, which helps cut down on all of the plastic packaging. I decided to try and find a store in San Francisco that would allow for this, and I stumbled upon Rainbow Grocery (http://www.rainbow.coop/). I visited the store on Saturday, and was blown away with the number of things that you could buy in bulk. Everything from lentils to pasta to all different types of oil to soap and lotion. It was amazing. Granted, I didn't have a lot of containers to put things in, and I was afraid that the process by which I was filling my containers up was wrong (according to their video, you're supposed to weight the empty container and then put a sticker on it with the weight of the empty container and the unique number of the product), so I only filled up two containers (one with oil and the other with soap), but I was impressed with the amount of products available for bulk shopping. The plastic bags that you could use if you didn't have your own containers were compostable though, which made me feel a lot better about using them.

Price wise, this was fairly comparable to TJs and Whole Foods (365 Brand), and bulk shopping is supposed to be cheaper (if you're actually buying in bulk, which I was not), which is the icing on top.

10/10 I would visit this place again!

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