Zero Waste Grocery Shopping
It was raining lightly when I arrived at Scoop Marketplace, and the parking spots in front of the store were already taken. Normally, I enjoy being out in the rain walking or running. But, in this case, I wished I could have found a closer parking spot. I grabbed the cardboard box out of my trunk and stayed close to the storefronts as I made my way over to the store. The awnings would keep the box a bit drier.
Scoop is a zero-waste store where customers bring their own containers, which is why I arrived carrying a cardboard box. It’s a small space that would feel crowded if half a dozen customers were in the store at once, but at this moment the store clerk and I are the only ones there.
The shelves are stocked with glass canisters filled with spices, nuts, flour, and other bulk foods. They also sell some household cleaning and personal care products. Everything is vegan.
As I filled one of my empty honey jars with sunflower seeds, I asked whether they planned to offer a dispenser with honey. The natural food co-op in my neighborhood used to do that pre-pandemic. The stainless steel vat was kept slightly warm to allow the honey to flow easily from the spout.
The store clerk explained to me that no, they weren’t going to sell honey. Some vegans abstain from honey. I get it. But if I’m going to add a sweetener, I choose honey because it’s more nutritious than sugar and I prefer the flavor. My favorite homemade bread recipe uses a tablespoon of honey in each loaf, so I go through it. I have several glass jars from honey that I refill with bulk food purchases.
Scoop is expanding its offerings. The store recently ran a crowdsourcing campaign to fund the purchase of a new taring system to weigh food, cold storage for kombucha on tap, and other equipment.
I contributed to the campaign by buying a founding membership. I like supporting small businesses, especially those that are working to reduce the amount of disposable packaging being produced.
Stephanie Lentz, the owner of Scoop, also hosts a podcast. called Green Stuff. On one episode she talked about the reality of running a zero waste store. Here’s a secret: it really isn’t zero waste. Those glass jars full of spices? The spices are much fresher than what you normally find at a grocery store—they smell and taste fantastic and add so much flavor to foods—but shipments arrive in plastic bags.
Scoop does recycle the plastic through Ridwell, a Seattle area company that collects various recyclables and ensures that they actually get recycled. But getting rid of plastic throughout the food system supply chain is not an easy problem to solve.
After I finished shopping at Scoop, I headed over to QFC. The difference was striking.
QFC is a full-service conventional grocery store. It started as a local brand, but industry giant Kroger purchased it over 20 years ago. The QFC has a parking lot out front with plenty of spots. As I started picking up items on my list, I noticed that almost everything in the store was packaged in plastic.
But I also noticed that it was so much quicker to grab a bag of something than to take out a glass jar, wait for a clerk to put a tare tag on it, and then take a metal scoop and fill the jar carefully to full but not overflowing.
Plastic packaging brings convenience and projects items from moisture damage during shipping. There’s a reason it has taken over. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should keep burning fossil fuels to make plastic packaging.
Scanning the shelves in the breakfast cereal aisle, I noticed a box marked “CheeriOats.” At first, I thought it was a knock-off brand. No, it’s a General Mills product. The cereal inside the special 80th anniversary box is a brand that launched as CheeriOats in 1941. General Mills changed the name to Cheerios four years later.
After I took that box home, I wondered what those original 1940s boxes of cereal looked like. They couldn’t have had a plastic liner made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE) since that material hadn’t yet been invented. I did a bit of research. The liners were probably made from waxed paper. The edges could be heated and sealed to keep the product fresh during shipping and storage.
Over the past eight decades, Cheerios has maintained its brand story. The cereal promotes itself as both convenient (the original boxes proclaimed “ready to eat” when that was a new concept) and healthy (low sugar, whole grain oats).
Speaking of brands, that was another key difference between QFC and Scoop. The shelves of QFC were stocked with products packaged in a way to promote their brand promises. Even the produce sections of conventional grocery stores feature many pre-packaged, branded products in addition to bins of loose fruits and vegetables.
Some of the household products at Scoop, like bars of soap or bamboo toothbrushes, come in paperboard boxes with a brand name and logo. But the bulk groceries are just labelled “cinnamon” or “cashews” or “whole wheat flour” with no brand name in sight.
Large corporations in the food industry are not clamoring for zero waste, packaging-free grocery stores. They want customers to choose their brands, and how can they do that if the branding is not prominently displayed? (There are ways. They could provide branded labels to stick onto bulk bins, but I haven’t seen that happening so far.)
Does Scoop represent the future of shopping? I don’t know. The lack of packaging and the freshness of the products is a big plus. I will continue to shop there for spices and baking supplies. But the vast array of items and grab and go convenience of supermarkets is hard to replace.