(Photo: Zero Market in Denver sells soaps, household cleaners, and other ingredients package-free. Credit: Zero Market)Grocery stores that eschew food packaging are emerging around Europe and North America. Tapping into distain for single-use plastic, these smaller brick-and-mortar retailers are striving to do what major grocery chains haven’t yet: achieve zero waste.
In Brooklyn, Katerina Bogatireva founded Precycle to sell organic local produce and bulk food without packaging. Customers can purchase reusable containers in the store or bring clean ones of their own. The container gets weighed prior to filling and then again during checkout so shoppers only pay for the food they pick out.
Bogatireva recently told Nooklyn.com’s Lyka Sethi that she was inspired to start Precycle in Bushwick after visiting a package-free store in Berlin called Original Unverpackt. “I go out of my way to buy things in bulk,” she said. “But it’s really inconvenient, so I realized that it would be nice to have something convenient. There are a lot of people that want to make that switch, it’s just really hard to do.”
Vancouver’s package-free grocery store Nada estimates that they have diverted more than 30,500 containers from landfills so far. Last month the store had a soft launch of a new in-store zero-waste cafe, encouraging customers to bring their own to-go cups and containers.
Kim Severson of the New York Times described how Nada sells everything, including toothpaste and chocolate, without packaging. “There’s no plastic wrap or paper at the deli counter,” she wrote. “Customers bring their own containers, buy reusable ones at the store or take some from a stack that have been cleaned and sanitized, using a digital scale to weigh and tag them before they start shopping.”
The list of similar stores, including Zero Market in Denver, is steadily getting longer. But the business model remains challenging. Last April, one of the first zero-waste grocery stores in the United States closed after five years in business. In.gredients in East Austin, Texas, initially opened in 2012 with a package-free approach, Austin Business Journal reported.
However, the store started losing business, Rene Brinkley wrote for CNBC. “We realized after 18 months we weren't changing shoppers habits,” former general manager Erica Howard Cormier told the outlet. “You have to plan a lot to go to the grocery store with your own containers and people would go to the store across the street because they forgot their container.”
When the lease came up for renewal, low sales prompted the founders to close, Brinkley reported. The store’s co-founder thinks the model could still work as long as operations are centralized and there are economies of scale.
Grocery chains haven’t ditched packaging altogether, but many are aiming to cut plastic waste. Kroger announced plans to phase out plastic bags across all stores by 2025. Wegmans Food Markets expanded its zero waste program last spring after a successful pilot. In August, Giant Food Stores said that its store in Cleona, Pennsylvania became the chain’s first to achieve 90% or more of waste diverted from landfill.
