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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE REFILLERY IS COMING FOR YOUR GROCERY STORE ROUTINE  
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Kate Ray
February 20, 2024
Taste Cooking
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_ At package-free stores you bring your own container, weigh it, and
fill it with the amount of rice or walnuts or Peanut M&Ms that you
want to take home. In the bigger context of the zero-waste movement,
do these refilleries actually mean anything? _

Bulk bins are where slow food meets the checkout aisle —and
they’re changing how many Americans shop., Jared Oriel

 

“This is slow shopping,” says Roque Rodriguez about his refillery
grocery store, Seed and Oil, in Woodside, Queens. “It’s about
slowing down, being more present, being more aware: What’s the
impact of the choice I just made? We educate folks when they come in,
we talk to them, and you see people getting into the rhythm of it.”

I don’t think it’s that much slower to shop at package-free stores
like Seed and Oil—you bring your own container and weigh it, then
you fill it up with the amount of rice or walnuts or Peanut M&Ms that
you want to take home. But I get what he means. The rising trend of
refilleries opening across the country feels very much in contrast to
the relentless imperative of easier, faster, more convenient—of
delivered groceries, boxed meal kits, and single-serving everything.
It takes advance planning to bring containers out with you (or extra
cash to buy one there), not to mention actually cooking the
ingredients you buy.

Bulk aisles aren’t new to the United States. Most of the refillery
owners I interviewed said they spent years shopping bulk at chain
stores but found the aisles unattended and messy, and sometimes the
products were stale or inedible. It was always awkward for customers
to bring their own containers to supermarkets and have them weighed by
cashiers, but when many stores banned the practice outright at the
height of COVID, the need for an alternative to the bulk aisle became
clearer than ever. Grocery co-ops can provide a better bulk goods
experience, and in fact there seem to be fewer refilleries in areas
better served by co-ops, like Vermont and Washington. However, co-ops
often take a minimum of five to ten years to launch, according to
Grocery Story author Jon Steinman. The Refillery Collective lists over
500 refilleries in its US directory (most sell home goods, while about
a quarter are grocery stores), and creator Jaime Durheim estimates
that half were launched post-COVID.

These stores use their small scale to their advantage by nimbly
adapting to customer needs.

Rodriguez and his partners opened their store in November after eight
years of running Suryaside Yoga down the block, which grew a community
so robust and supportive that it helped raise the store’s initial
capital. Grocery is a completely different business, but to him,
it’s just another way of fulfilling a need in his neighborhood. Many
of the refillery owners I spoke to come from different
backgrounds—restaurants, organic farms, earth science PhDs, waste
management engineering, local government, big-box stores—but they
share a mission of serving their communities by changing the way
people shop. This is not easy. They know they can’t compete on
convenience, so what they offer instead is an experience that’s more
human, connected, and local. These stores use their small scale to
their advantage by nimbly adapting to customer needs and by developing
direct relationships with local suppliers who can meet their
sustainability and packaging standards. Though the prices aren’t the
lowest, most stores carry items that are local or fair trade and made
by small producers, so you’re getting good quality for the value.

For me and many regulars, stopping by my local refillery, Maison Jar,
in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is like going to my favorite coffee shop or
my closest bodega. I greet the cashiers and chat with them about what
I’m cooking while I stroll the silos to see if there’s anything
new. I started shopping there because it was the only place with a
fresh peanut butter machine in my neighborhood; then I found that the
eggs were gorgeous and golden (and at 50 cents each, they cost
slightly less than the organic and Certified Humane ones at my
supermarket). Later I discovered a chai spice granola that became my
favorite breakfast (and it’s $16 per pound, 30% cheaper than the
bagged version). I started buying small-batch tofu from a maker in
Ithaca, New York, in a returnable jar ($5 after the jar deposit), and
vegetables when I couldn’t make it to the farmers’ market.

I’m a chef, working as a cooking instructor at Hudson Table, and
I’m sensitive to the quality and freshness of my ingredients. I also
care about sourcing in terms of the distance food travels and whether
the people and animals involved are treated humanely. I’ve gotten to
know the owner of Maison Jar, Larasati Vitoux, and I appreciate that
she cares about the same things, which helps me trust her curation.

“In a big grocery store, there are a lot of products, so it actually
can take more time because you have that choice paralysis,” says
Vitoux. Trust is a big element in the relationship between refillery
owners and their regulars. Shopping at these stores can be a way of
offloading the mental weight of making good choices in a competitive,
greenwashed marketplace of “sustainable” food products. In a world
where “natural” means nothing, it’s comforting to trust a person
from your community over a big brand that you’ll never have a
conversation with.

   

     Of course, not all refillery owners have PhDs in earth
science (although Jessica Walden and Chris McGuire of Amis de la Terre
in Orange County, California, do), and they can struggle with how to
balance sustainability concerns with quality and price when choosing
suppliers. However, the exigencies of “package-free” often
translate to local and fresh as well. Jim Switzer from Black Cat Bulk
Goods in New Paltz, New York, called a “zero- waste general
store,” picks up 25-pound bags of flour once a week from a local
community grain project, Wild Hive Farm, that mills it fresh for them.
Paula McPhee of Vancouver Island Refillery brings returnable
containers to tofu, yogurt, and granola makers within a five-block
radius. Rachel Garcia of Dry Goods Refillery in Montclair, New Jersey,
found a tomato sauce vendor, My Dad’s Sauce, that cans in her area
and convinced the company to create a line using returnable jars for
her store. She also hired a private composting service so that
customers can bring back the small amount of packaging in the shop to
ensure that it gets commercially composted.

Some of the shop owners acknowledge that being located in an affluent
neighborhood keeps them in business—though there are plenty of
exceptions, from economically mixed neighborhoods like Woodside to
rural locations like Pine Plains in New York’s Dutchess County. Many
of the stores accept EBT; Garcia knocks off an extra 15% for anyone
who uses it. But it’s a niche market that requires a willing, paying
clientele to keep the lights on in a business with margins so tight
that many shop owners choose to forego salaries for their first year
or more.

           

Matt Zimbalist, Carly Fishman, and Peter Lollo at Re-Up Refill Shop in
Oakland, California, say they’ve consulted with around 50
prospective owners looking to start their own stores, and that the
majority either never got off the ground or went out of business
quickly. Even large refilleries with dedicated followings, like Scoop
Marketplace in Seattle, Washington, and in.gredients in Austin, Texas,
which raised $30,000 from supporters on Indiegogo, weren’t able to
stay open for longer than five or six years, citing rising business
costs. People loved these stores, but are refilleries just another eco
fad, like putting all your trash in a Mason jar? In the bigger context
of the zero-waste movement, do these tiny stores actually mean
anything?

“Stores that offer bulk [items] are great, but they rely on
individual consumers to change their behavior,” says Mara Shulman,
senior attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF). “That
isn’t ever going to be enough to fix the plastic trash crisis we are
experiencing in the United States and globally. And, after all, the
corporate actors responsible for our trash crisis should be
responsible for fixing it, not individual consumers.” Only 9% of
plastic is recycled globally, and the bulk of plastic waste comes from
food packaging. CLF is pushing to change packaging laws that fail to
hold giants like Amazon accountable. Meanwhile, independent refillery
stores are swimming upstream in a system where everything is optimized
against them.

“We spent so much money, as a culture, investing in these assembly
lines and packaging lines in America that plastics are damn cheap. And
so it’s actually much more expensive to do bulk,” says Zimbalist.
Part of what makes the refillery business so challenging is that
they’re not only trying to change consumer behavior, they’re
trying to change supplier behavior, which is essentially the entire
American food system.

The trio at Re-Up, though, have spent their careers in the waste
reduction field, and as their store grows, they’re starting to see
successes. Dr. Bronner’s and Moon Valley Organics are among the
businesses they’ve persuaded to incorporate reusable or
“circular” packaging into their supply chain. This can mean
individual containers that can be returned for a deposit or large
drums that Re-Up trades directly with the supplier. Whenever possible,
Re-Up tries to educate customers about the work they’re doing.
“We’re pretty excited that it’s gaining traction,” says
Zimbalist. “For us, the idea is that more consumers get exposed to a
different way of consumption. They change the way they think about
their purchasing power and hopefully demand more as consumers and as
voters, and everything along the way.”

     

 It’s hard to imagine what a different grocery landscape might look
like, but France could offer a clue. Vitoux got her idea for Maison
Jar after returning to visit friends and family and finding
refilleries in every city. The trend started ten years ago in France,
but it was bolstered by the government’s anti-waste legislation in
2019, which bans some single-use plastics, puts pressure on suppliers
to use circular packaging, and even forces big chains like Auchan and
Carrefour to dedicate one-fifth of each store to bulk goods. French
people have a different attitude toward food and shopping (a robust
social services net allows the French to spend around 14% of their
income on groceries, versus our 7% in the United States) and a history
of stronger government regulation in the food industry, so I don’t
see us transforming our system to look like theirs anytime soon. But
it’s encouraging to know that a different way of shopping is
possible.

“I don’t know when the breakthrough moment happens—if it’s the
mom-and- pops that come from the bottom, if it’s a corporation that
finally figures it out, or if it’s a combination of grassroots meets
corporation meets law—but I do feel like it’s growing,” says
Garcia, when I ask her about the refillery movement as a whole. “I
don’t know if refilleries like mine are the solution. But I think
it’s realistic to say that a store like ours is changing minds in
the community...The change in mindset is hopefully the actual trend
that’s happening, more than just opening refilleries.”

When I go shopping at Maison Jar or Seed and Oil (it’s farther from
me, but they have Burlap & Barrel spices in bulk), I’m thinking more
about what I’m going to cook for dinner than what effect my beans
might have on government policy or big-box infrastructure. But I
notice that it feels strange now to unwrap my supermarket bananas and
toss out the plastic bag. I’ve started bringing my soap containers
to refill at the stores since I’m going there anyway. I’m changing
some habits, one at a time. And while I know that it isn’t
sufficient for me, or for any of us, to change our shopping habits, it
is also necessary if we are to someday live in a world with less
waste.

Kate Ray is a writer and cooking teacher based in Brooklyn, NY. Her
goal is to help people of all ages learn to trust their tastes in the
kitchen and express themselves through cooking. She writes a
newsletter about cooking at kateray.substack.com.

* food waste; sustainability;
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* grocery stores; shopping habits; supermarket
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