Not all health food stores are created equal. As we've mentioned before, a lot of the stuff that a person will find lining the shelves of most of them isn't healthy at all. But surely, some types of health food stores are better than others? How does the average consumer separate the great places from the not so great ones? Let's take a closer look.
5. Decide what kinds of specialty grocery items are most important to you.
This may seem like an obvious thing to figure out, but a lot of customers coming through the health food store I work at seem to think that our shop will be able to supply them with everything they have on their shopping list. While that may sound like a reasonable thing to expect, no store can carry every "healthy" item in the world, and most of the better ones seem to excel in some areas and less so in others. For instance, the place I work at has a great organic produce section, but a not very amazing bulk goods department. So a person who came in looking for organic kale or apples will usually rave about the store, while the old hippie dude that comes in expecting to find several different varieties of organic oats in big bins might be disappointed. I often get asked why such an injustice has occurred, and the answer is usually something basic like "we don't have enough space" or "we don't have a vendor that carries that anymore."
And another shop might have made different choices regarding which items they focus on, and what suppliers they buy from.
Revival Market in The Heights is a fantastic small grocery store that carries local beef, pork, and poultry, produce from regional farms, and even locally-grown grains and seasonings. Co-owner Morgan Weber founded Revival Meats to cultivate heritage breed meats, raised in a humane environment on a small, sustainable family farm.