Asheville, North Carolina — A jar of peanut butter is $1 more expensive than last year, more than a gallon of conventional milk in the world $6 to inch In some cities, paying $1.49 for a family-sized box of crispy rice cereal seems like a good idea, even if it’s August and the cereal is dyed red and green for Christmas. It may seem
In a salvage store, a deal is a deal.
at the price of groceries 13.1% higher The joy of shopping at a salvage food store than a year ago, according to the July consumer price index, where crushed boxes are okay, package dates are mere suggestions, and dubious marketing attempts. A new customer base discovered the pitfalls. (Hostess snowball-flavoured coffee pods?) To die for.
What mainstream food retailers call “unsold” operates in a gray area between food banks and big discount chains like German imports. Aldi Also General Dollarhas grown to over 18,000 stores.
with a name like sharp shopper, dented can When stretch a backAdventurous shoppers looking for bargains use them for culinary treasure hunts. Now people sick of inflation are joining their ranks.
Maggie Kilpatrick food blogger A cooking teacher in St. Paul, Minnesota, who has celiac disease, visited a thrift store for the first time in June after the prices of her favorite gluten-free products skyrocketed. You mentioned a salvage store miles away.
“I was shocked,” she said. “There were so many gluten-free, organic, high-quality things I never expected to find in this bumpy little store in Fridley, Minnesota.”
A package of two baguettes from her beloved company typically sells for about $6.99. She received her 3 packages for her $5. Her vegan butter was $1.99, about $5 less than what she pays at Whole Foods Her Market.
“I can see people going crazy,” she said.
Many of the stores are small, some do not use cash register scanners, and some do not take credit cards, making it difficult to get a complete picture of national sales.Analysis of 405,101 receipts submitted by consumers to consumer rewards apps fetch The number of households shopping at salvage stores in the first half of the year showed an increase of more than 8% over the previous year.
the manager of Dickies, the small North Carolina chain, said sales were up 36% from last summer. Other store managers reported he had double-digit increases. Nicholas Duke, 27, who manages what was until recently called Price is Right in this tourist-friendly town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, said: .
The owner recently renamed the store to Uplifting Deals. It sells tubes of frozen hamburgers for $2 a pound, from faded lemons and canned tomatoes to his 99-cent bottles of celebrity chef marinades.
“We’re trying to clean it up and show people that it’s going to be a real shopping experience,” Duke said.
In another twist, salvage food stores are attracting environmentally conscious consumers looking to do what they can to reduce the USDA’s estimated $161 billion worth of food that ends up in landfills each year. .
That’s why Lin Ziobro started the website buy salvage food Two years ago. She maintains maps of relief food stores across the country and provides guidance on how to reduce food waste.
“Most people who visit my site are looking for ways to save money on groceries, and I hope I can raise awareness about food waste while they are there,” she said. .
The idea came to me when I grew frustrated with helping a friend find a retailer that sold flavored nuts that Amazon was removing from its platform as the expiration date approached. Traffic to her site has more than tripled since last year and now stands at around 11,000 per month.
A handful of new waste-conscious businesses have taken the salvage store concept online to ship items that would otherwise go to waste, such as meat and dairy, overstock and farmer’s groceries. .
“I think the food waste fighter mindset is going hand in hand with people who want value,” said Abhi Ramesh, who founded a delivery company. Misfits Market The company is growing rapidly and has shipped over 14 million orders since its inception.
Salvage shopping has spawned a small sub-genre on social media. People record their trips to the store and view their packages like trophies stacked on their kitchen counters. In March, one TikTok The video went viral, sent hundreds of people into unprepared Oklahoma City stores where they stripped shelves. The store closed shortly after.
One of the shop’s fans was 53-year-old Tan Tran. He is a waste-savvy cook who is deeply invested in food politics and locally sourced foods. “You can eat past the due date without any problem,” she said. “I’m not germophobic. I’m just using my sense of smell.”
As any smart salvage shopper knows, dates on food packages usually don’t mean much. Whether ‘sell by’, ‘best by’ or ‘expired’, they are intended to help stores and manufacturers manage their inventory and let consumers know when their products are at their best.
federal government neither demanding nor regulating Dates in all foods except infant formula. Most states have rules regarding meal dates, but they vary greatly.
Last year, Congress began considering National uniform rule We use only two phrases: “Best if used by” to indicate quality and “use by” to indicate when a food may become unsafe to eat. LifedAn organization that studies food waste.
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with food that’s been recalled or past its expiration date,” said Sarah Kaplan, 29, who runs her family’s four Dickies food stores in Asheville. “I grew up in this environment all my life, but I’m not dead.”
Veterans of salvage shopping suggest that newcomers get to know the stores and staff who can point out real bargains.
Trust yourself, not the labels, they say. Check the date your product will be delivered to the store and visit early to make the best choice. Then choose a good shop. They range from chain stores in affluent suburbs to handmade markets with cluttered shelves and tender vegetables.
“I’ve told many friends and colleagues, ‘You have to be willing to sift through the bad to find out what it is,'” he said. Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Projectbased in Asheville.
One Saturday, Nikolai was loading $100 worth of groceries into his Prius. Her three boys can consume a bag of granola and her gallon of milk a day, she said.
She uses the money she saves to buy meat from pasture-raised animals and fruit and vegetables at the local farmers market.
Although she appreciates the savings, Nicholie enjoys hunting. During her most recent trip, she found her 1 pound foil-wrapped European her style butter for $2.50. The shipping box, which weighed 36 pounds, was ripped and one wrapper was torn, so the distributor sold the entire case to a recovery food broker.
Food brokers can be as small as a few ambitious people with a few connections in trucks and restaurant distribution warehouses. Others are advanced operations working directly with food giants such as Hormel and Mondelez.
Food manufacturers have reorganized their products or changed their packaging and have had to unload vast amounts of excess inventory. Sales forecasts are subject to change. Manufacturers sell to stores or brokers who agree to keep the food product out of the retail mainstream so that the brand’s pricing strategy and image are not compromised.
Some salvage store owners have direct relationships with grocery chains who have to clean up food they couldn’t sell at a discounted price or food that is nearing its expiration date. Some owners buy their bread directly from people who drive local delivery routes.
It’s an unpredictable system whose currency is reputation, connections, and hustle. And it has its share of villains.
“I knew someone who wiped the dates off the mayonnaise. Java Holdings, Los Angeles Food and Merchandise Liquidator. He began working 31 years before him at a company that sold canned vegetables that had dented a cannery in Northern California that was attacked in 1989. Loma Prieta earthquake.
His company now has 11 employees, several distribution centers, and the ability to repackage and relabel surplus merchandise to hide the name of national brands. When the pandemic shut down travel, leaving cruise ships and airlines with tons of frozen food and tanks of orange juice, he found a buyer. When PepsiCo discontinued the Aunt Jemima brand in 2021 due to racist overtones, he liquidated 50 truckloads of syrup and pancake mix.
“I’m addicted,” he said. “My best friend calls it a casino.”
Salvage stores and food banks are not competing for surplus food, he said. The government has capped the amount of food businesses can donate for tax purposes. Food banks turn to salvage brokers when they need to purchase certain items, such as canned tuna or pinto beans, to complete their offerings to their families.
Some salvage store owners, especially in rural areas, view their stores as extensions of food banks and their work as a religious mission.
Hunter’s Salvage Grocery, near the Tennessee border in Trenton, Georgia, is one of them. 47-year-old Stephanie Hunter runs a 4,000-square-foot store in a small mall. Her customers come and go between her store and her general at Dollar next door.
She has many customers who were struggling to feed their families before inflation pushed food prices up.
She prices her food as low as possible, even though inflation is also affecting the discount food market. At Hunters, a can of tomatoes is $1 for her and six for her. A loaf of bread costs $1. Last month, she decided to offer her 5-to-1 special of infant formula to her father, who almost cried because he could only afford one can.
Ms. Hunter orders food from a broker who assembles a pallet of banana boxes filled with similar products labeled “drinks” or “groceries.” But she never knows what she’s getting.
She unpacks each order full of birthday girl wishes. Sometimes there are only disappointments in the box.
“We got some stuff and you’re like, ‘No wonder you got this.’Sometimes it’s really good, but obviously someone missed that trend train. ”
And then there are the days when she hits a pay stain, like a ton of coffee in a K-cup going fast, or a case of Velvita cheese she sells for $5 a block.
“It’s pure gold,” she said.
