Plea + Solution for Food Sellers

Posted on by da-AL

My dear blog reader, if you or anyone you know agrees with the letter below, won’t you please share it, hashtag it, copy/paste it, add your name to it, and do whatever you like to get the basic sentiment out there? (And read on for an additional message to you that follows it.)

Dear Trader Joe’s, as well as other grocery stores and processed food manufacturers,

Food, glorious food! I love your stuff, and I adore it all the better when you sell it in containers that are healthy and easy to re-use.

Rather than cans and near-impossible-to-recycle (let alone repurpose) plastic vacuum-sealed boxes, sell us stuff in containers like these!…

Something delish…
Tastes better when it’s in something useful…
Like how this keeps a snack fresh!

Here’s the kind of jars I love best — think healthy, easy-to-clean, and uniform in which to store my beans, grains, flour, pasta, and such:

  • Straight-sided and where I can easily reach in wash clear down to the bottom.
  • Labels that require just a quick soak to remove.
  • Better yet, no labels at all, as in the case of the adorable drinking glasses illustrated after this letter — how sublime that the Welch’s name appears only in fine print!
  • Interchangeable sizes and lids would be extra classy!

The mustard sauce in the photo is great — and is all the better for the jar!

Yours truly,

da-AL — a customer who I doubt is alone

P.S. Don’t think you can get away with overpricing products with super-cute holiday gift-type containers and expect us to think you’ve done anyone a favor.

Back to you my dear cyberland friend,

As you can guess from above, I’m asking businesses to go beyond using less plastic. It’s lovely when grocers sell us food in glass jars. Let’s encourage them to take it up a gazillion notches by doing something that’ll benefit us while making us more loyal to them!

I hope you’ll share this with anyone who’s as upset as I am with how impossible it is to get away from plastic. Share this with individuals as well as with businesses. Even small gestures can go a long way when they’re multiplied. As consumers, our wallets wield immense power.

Every time I turn around, I read more scary stuff about how corrosive plastics are to our bodies, and downright catastrophic to the environment. There may have been a time when we deluded ourselves that plastic was better than glass, but these days, we know better.

When I was small, my family ate Welch’s jam. Why? Sure, it was tasty, and we needed something not too expensive for our toast — but with all the jams out there, Welch’s outsmarted the others! Theirs was in glass jars meant to be repurposed into drinking glasses! Customers wanted to collect the cute freebies while getting decent jams at the same time.

In the stone-age, harhar, jam came in these. They were great to drink out of and made shoppers want to go buy more to collect them!

Win-win joy here, there, everywhere!! Pardon me while I do a little jig at the keyboard! Why the heck don’t all stores and all brands continue to do something like what I described?

For crafty readers and those of us who enjoy looking at stuff we’ll never do — here and here and here and here and here and here and here are some links. Key search words: repurpose and up-cycle.

Do you know an easy way to help stem the tide of plastic?

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Published by da-AL

Happiness Between Tails speaks to and from the heart. It connects lovers — of pets, authors, books — and of my still-unreleased novels, “Flamenco + the Sitting Cat” and “Tango + the Sitting Cat.” The stories are my love letters to all who fear they're too odd, too damaged, too old, too whatever to find happiness. ContactdaAL@gmail.com • BuyMeACoffee.com/SupportHBT

50 thoughts on “Plea + Solution for Food Sellers”

  2. Yes! I wish more retailers would consider packaging. Personally, I’ve stopped using plastic bags for the most part, but I’m at a loss when it comes to what to do with doggy-doo. Anyone got a good suggestion for environmentally friendly ways to stoop and scoop?

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I’ve been using veggie bags (tho lately a friend has suggested I take my own veggie bags to store) – also, I save bags from bread, etc. Someone told me to buy the recycled kind from pet store, but so far have managed to scrounge enough from recycling types of things…

      Liked by 1 person

        1. me too re veggie bags lol — a friend of mine is very very good – she has her doggie only poo in backyard & scoops it up immediately – guh, tho – I have little backyard that my bedroom looks onto & I hate idea of looking onto a poo container…

          Liked by 1 person

            1. Lolol I hate to admit, but I feel like I should boycott tiny dogs — they don’t want to be bred to be that small – tho I’d love if I could take my medium-sized doggie on airplanes like others take their ‘large rats’…

              Like

  3. Nicely done, da-AL! It’s great there’s increasingly more awareness about being eco-friendly and trying to ditch the plastic. What bugs me is where plastic is used but it’s not recyclable.. why bother? Why not at least package it in the stuff that can be recycled? Glass jars make a better alternative. But please – dear retails – stop putting stuff in ridiculously overpriced packaging to make us believe it’s better for the environment when it’s cheaper for you while charging us three times the price! xx

    Liked by 1 person

    2. Btw, I just tried to comment on your newest post, but somehow it won’t let me. Just want to say am so glad you’re hanging in there — love your kitty! Didn’t know you had one 🙂

      Like

      1. Aww no, what happens when you try to comment? That’s so frustrating, I’m sorry you’ve had a problem with it. I know you can’t comment through the reader, you have to go on the actual site (I think because I’ve got a paid-for theme and am self hosted perhaps). Do you get an error message?
        Yes, kittykat can be cute…when he wants to be! Don’t be fooled by the cuteness 😂
        xxxx

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Ah, yes, now I remember — you’ve mentioned that before about not being able to comment thru reader — it’s part of why I don’t do self-hosted. When I comment on your posts it’s often via the email announcements that you’ve got a new post

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