Keeping our door open, even in winter

A lot of people (including our landlord) have asked us why we are keeping our door open now that the weather is cold. The answer is that we want to keep our store around 60 degrees, to keep the produce fresh. This is about the same temperature you’ll find in the produce departments of big grocery stores, like Treasure Island (I recently measured it at 62 F). Anything below 55 hurts things like tomatoes and bananas (and employees!), so whenever the temperature in the store drops into the mid-50s, we close the door until it warms up above 60 again. Even if we didn’t have produce to worry about, we’d want to keep it in the 65 F range anyway just to keep our customers in coats from overheating.

Don’t worry: our heaters are completely turned off and have been the whole season. The only thing that heats the store back up are its adjacent walls (made of brick), the lights, the people (about 100 watts per person), and the compressors on our fridge and freezer. Any marginal additional fuel consumed to heat the surrounding retail or residential spaces that might be slightly cooled by having a 60-degree neighbor are certainly offset by the reduction in the amount of produce that rots before we can sell it (that produce has still accrued environmental costs in the form of transportation and cooling before it reached our shelves). We’d really like to get off-board compressors for our fridge/freezer that sit in the basement or outside — they are more efficient and would make the store quieter — but the initial capital costs are very high. At any rate, our glass-doored fridges are much more energy efficient than those open coolers you’ll find in most supermarkets.

On the shelf: organic carrots (with greens still attached), beautiful organic spinach in bunches, organic beefsteak tomatoes, key limes, eggplant, pomegranates, clementines, tuna (cactus fruit), pineapples, egg nog, silk nog (vegan egg nog), hummus, sparkling cider, Tofurkey sausages.