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Grocery Market: A little market with big ideas!
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An Earth-Friendly Market
Downtown Grocery™ is earth-friendly following sustainable ideas from initial concept to daily operations.
Downtown Grocery is an Everyday Farm Market...
"...featuring regional farmers, producers and food entrepreneurs...
to nurture an earth-friendly place...
to share food ideas and grow a local food economy and...
hey, by the way, farmer's rule!" says Kevin Korpela.
Many of the earth-friendly practices found at Downtown Grocery are listed below:
- Grocery Bags --- We've several options for carrying home your groceries:
- Brown and white paper bags
- Encourage the use of reusable bags:
- such as a paper bag from your last visit
- or a cloth bag, backpack, messenger bag, big purse or an upturned hat!
- Or try one of our reusable bag options:
- "25¢ Bag Project" --- Buy a sturdy brown bag for 25¢, reuse 10 times, earn 25¢
- Our own reusable bags available in May 2008
- Local and Organic --- Emphasize food grown and produced at local-organic farms, such as MoonShadow Farm, to minimize industrial methods, limit transportation costs and offer more farm to table options.
- Reuse an old building --- Restored a 100 year old retail storefront (constructed about 1910) on Wausau's "Main Street." Reconstruction began on March 1, 2006 by painting a gigantic vegetable mural on our windows, then removed non-original finishes revealing a hardwood floor, tin ceiling and plaster walls.
- Main street location --- Located the old-fashioned grocery market inside a 1500 SF historic storefront on a "Main Street" to add one more interesting retail shop to "Main Street" and rejuvenate an old-fashioned concept: walking, biking or just less driving for those citizens living, working and socializing on Wausau's East-side.
- Energy-efficient lighting --- Installed compact fluorescent lighting for the "school-house" ceiling-hung light fixtures and we're working to replace the spot and accent lights with compact fluorescent illumination, too.
- Earth-friendly degreasers --- The tin ceiling was grimmy from an oil furnace gone bad or maybe a century of use. We used an earth-friendly degreaser, a sponge, and a wheeled scaffold to hand-scrub the ceiling!
- Earth-friendly paints --- The rich-colored walls were painted with a no-VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) paint. The paint takes a little extra effort in regards to its application but the richness in color is unmatched.
- Energy-star certified equipment --- Use Energy-star rated equipment as much as possible.
- Chicken and Geese "Composters" --- What? Yes, we feed the "waste" produce from the kitchen at Deli-berations (an urban deli) to the chickens and geese living at MoonShadow Farm.
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