This week, after reading some survey feedback asking for more single person sized offerings, I was working with Josh, Fair Food’s produce buyer, on a new  “one person” box we are going to offer soon.  The conversation shifted from smaller sizes to our largest bulk box lots and how people could share and save money.  Josh reckoned Fair Food should make more of the sharing possibilities of bulk and I agreed.  So here we go – if you check out our Bulk Section on the webstore you’ll find most of our products in bulk quantities costing about 20% less than usual sizes.  But what if you can’t use these big amounts?  Well, you could get a couple of friends or family members together and split, say a box of apples etc between you and still pocket the discount.   

Why, you say, would Fair Food be advocating such retail madness – surely we want to make more money from selling individual items?  The answer is, no actually, Fair Food started as a small staff food co-op and we love seeing people getting together to share.  Also, selling in bulk means less handling and often less packaging (which brings us more joy).  The Fair Food packing crew loves saving packaging and for every 12 kg box of apples etc not broken into individual kilos it removes 12 bags from the waste stream.  Everyone wins.

All this bulk talk got me thinking.  This weekend I brought home a five litre container of dish-washing liquid which we’ll use to top-up a little sink-top bottle.  And as I put the big container under the sink I had this unexpected sense of well-being come over me – kind of a contented “we’ll never ever run out of dish-washing liquid again” feeling. Read more …