D.C. Metro Supermarket Chain Hosts Farmers Market

Smart Markets Brings Local Food to Retail Grocery Store

Unlikely Allies: Smart Market Debuts at… Safeway?

by Susan Blasko, Guest Blogger

Imagine for a moment how life would be if, in your quest for safe, healthy, nutrient dense, real food, you would need to look no further than your neighborhood Safeway Store. Yes, we’re talking about non-GMO produce grown using little or no chemical pesticides or fertilizers, and meats from grass fed animals raised without antibiotics, hormones or steroids. Impossible? Well, not anymore.

Farmer Meets Safeway Shopper during Sidewalk Sale of Local Foods

In a special partnership forged between Smart Markets and the Safeway Store in Pan Am Shopping Center (corner of Lee Highway and Nutley in Fairfax), you can now purchase farm fresh produce from local, sustainable farmers and food artisans, right outside the doors of Safeway, every Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. All of the farmers and vendors are local. And you know what that means! Produce is picked fresh, and doesn’t sit in store houses for weeks or months before being shipped long distances to find its way to the grocery store shelves. And in most cases, the prices are lower than certified organic.

Whose brilliant idea was this? Scott Hartman, Manager of the Safeway Store, and Jean Janssen of Smart Markets put their heads together and came up with a plan to offer farm fresh foods, build community, and bridge the chasm between local food producers and big chain grocery stores.

Good Citizen Safeway Offers Farmers Opportunity to Showcase Local Food at their Supermarket

But will it last? That’s up to you! Get out there and shop! Bring your friends. Spread the word. Introduce yourself to Scott and ask him if maybe, just maybe, he would consider carrying local foods inside the store, too.

Wouldn’t it be great if more supermarkets did this? Visit other grocery stores in your area and let them know about how one Safeway Store is ushering in the new food paradigm. Show them what you bought. Tell them how affordable it was. And then, proceed with a deliberate pace to the check-out, all the while exclaiming, “The food revolution has begun!”

Susan Blasko

Susan Blasko is a cancer survivor twice over. She now incorporates local farm fresh foods into her diet in her on-going quest for health. Susan is a volunteer chapter leader of the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Falls Church, Virginia chapter, and an assistant organizer of the Northern Virginia Whole Foods Nutrition meetup group. She was selected at random to speak at the USDA Listening Session on NAIS (National Animal Idenification System) that took place in Harrisburg, PA earlier this year. Here is the complete text of her remarks in a previous post on Hartkeisonline.com.

See Susan’s article on the Virginia prison system training its prisoners in farming skills on state park land, Prison Food the Grassfed Model, which was linked to by a Huffington Post blogger last year.