Getting Vocal about Locally Grown Foods

Sprouts has become a pretty big company. It is getting harder for our produce buyers to piece together their weekly patchwork quilt of sources to supply each store with enough blueberries, green cabbage and red peppers. They have to visit more farms, meet more growers, call more distributors, and jump on the best deals as quickly as they can. Go to their office early in the morning (their day starts around 4am) and it is sometimes as busy and chaotic as the floor of the Chicago Commodity Exchange.

But we decided we would make things even harder for them, by passing along your requests that they buy more local foods.

Truth is, there is no real definition of "local" (though the government is working on one). Some supermarkets use the "local" label for anything that was grown within the same region or state; others define it as within 100 miles. Even that can be confusing, however — because, for example, lots of the produce grown within 100 miles of our Sunnyvale, CA store near San Jose actually gets shipped down to Los Angeles by the growers, and then reshipped up to the Bay Area to our store. And it gets there well before some of the produce that is delivered from just a few miles away. So is that really local produce? There's obviously no environmental or freshness benefit to this process, but it is an understandable by-product of an agricultural system that needs to find every efficiency in order to survive.

And we know that we haven't been great marketers of local products. We already carry plenty of locally produced grocery items and (in season) locally grown fruits and vegetables. We just haven't done an adequate job of telling that story.

Still, we want to support the small farmers and food producers more. We want to get the ripest fruits and the freshest vegetables. We want to find those little local packaged products that make each of our markets unique. We want to reduce our carbon footprint. And we'd love to do all of those things if we can somehow find a way that doesn't drive the prices up. It's a huge challenge. But we promise to make a concerted effort to "exercise our local cords" as often as we can.

From the January, 2011 edition of Fresh Off the Press