Enough said, right?!?!?
Our kitchen is ramping up production of new and delicious foods to prepare for the impending opening of the upstairs cafe! Our latest addition is the beginning of a sushi line, made with all organic ingredients, raw (except for the rice) and vegan. The sushi burrito (pictured above) has organic sushi rice cooked with traditional mirin, wrapped in nori and filled with local pea shoots from New Harvest Farm, organic carrots, organic cucumbers, organic avocado, organic red cabbage, and tamari-marinated mushrooms!
We also have a simple cucumber avocado roll with Kite Hill's amazing vegan cream cheese for a quick vegan meal that is perfect to eat on the go.
Both options come with pickled ginger, wasabi, and a choice of a GF tamari dipping sauce or vegan Sriracha mayonnaise.
AND they're both on sale through January 30! The sushi burrito is on sale for $7.99 and the avocado cream cheese roll is on sale for $5.99!
Plus, there's this Mandarin Salad, too. Made with farmer-exchange mandarin oranges at the peak of the California citrus season, crispy ramen noodles, and a killer Asian ginger dressing, this salad will absolutely knock your socks off.
ON SALE until January 30th for $6.99!
HUGE WELLNESS INVENTORY SALE
Alright everyone, we are seriously moving forward with the upstairs cafe. We're planning to have it opening sometime in early February, with an additional hang out space so you don't have to take your food to the porch in the middle of winter to enjoy it (although this year we skirted around the problem by simply not having a winter, just a long fall that seems to be already transitioning to spring). This space will double as a workshop area, where we can share all kinds of food experiences with the community.
To prepare all that space, hoever, we need to move through a lot of the extra inventory we have, especially with wellness items. So when you walk in the front door, check out our temporary sale rack, where we put a great number of items on sale at 30% off!
This includes the last of the remaining Garden of Life items, which if you haven't heard, have been bought by Nestle and thus are no longer welcome in our cooperative.
We will continue to fill this rack up with sale items through the end of the month or until we get our wellness department moved downstairs and prepared foods department moved upstairs. This is a major first step towards the final move - get ready!
NEW LOCAL KAVA
"What is kava, anyways?"
Kristen is the owner of Sol in the West Street Market, and she never gets tired of answering this question. She sells organic, fair trade teas made with Fijian kava, a popular Pacific Islander drink, which is made from the root of the kava plant steeped like a tea.
It's a potent drink, tongue-tingling and earthy, and is known to help calm your body and relax your mind. Many people enjoy it as a social alternative to alcohol, and now that we're selling it at the co-op, you can make your own, or have some infused in different flavors of organic tea!
COMPOSTABLE CONTAINERS!
We are proud to announce that our soup and coffee containers are officially transitioning to all-compostable cups and lids! Slowly but surely, the rest of the world is catching on - we're so excited to see how far we've come in the past few decades towards seeing sustainability take root across the globe. We still have a long ways to go, but every step counts!
Reno Rot Riders
Food waste is a big problem.
Don't believe us? It is estimated that fully one third of all food produced in this country is thrown away into landfills that sometimes accumulate up to 10,000 TONS of waste ... per day. Oh, and did you know the largest landfill in the USA is in our home state of Nevada? (Of course, it's in Vegas.)
So that's why we're doing our absolute best to keep food out of the landfills, and Reno's own Rot Riders play a large part in helping us out.
When food doesn't look as good as it could, or gets an unsightly bruise, we are quick to funnel it to our kitchen or juice bar, finding ways to use what people are now affectionately calling "ugly" fruits and vegetables. If those are not up to our standards, we offer them to the Reno Initiative for Shelter Equality (RISE), a local non-profit that provides meals for the underprivileged of Reno.
After all that, any leftovers from this whole process have reached a place of inedibility.
So we collect all those, and the pulp from our juice bar, and give it to Reno Rot Riders, a local composting service that works with a bunch of restaurants and home gardens to take the collected food waste in Reno, transform it by the miracle alchemy of a hot compost pile, and distribute it to people's home gardens to increase the most locally sourced food production imaginable - backyard gardens!
It is a win for the store - we can support more local businesses and meet our sustainability standards. It's a win for the environment, which no longer has to absorb larger landfills with anaerobic decomposition. It's a win for gardeners, who get living compost to help their plants in this alkaline dry desert. It's a win for the worms and the fungi that work so hard to turn food waste into soil, and it's a win for Reno for all the above reasons!
STAFF PICK!
Andrew Yokom has been many things to this co-op over the years: early morning intake, grocery stocker, produce stocker, cashier, department buyer, department leader, human resources, store operations manager, backup general manager ... and usually many of these on the same day! How does he manage it all?!?
The answer is simple - he eats only the best fresh organic fruits and vegetables (and unsold buritos), including has favorite organic Pink Lady Apples - delicate, crisp, and refreshing - just like Andrew!
Say hi to him next time you're in and thank him for making the co-op the great place it is :)
USDA Reverses Long-Awaited
Poultry Rules!
The USDA and the NOP (National Organic Program) have spent 14 years collecting data to create a much needed rule that requires a certain square footage for certified organic chickens (and eggs), as well as outdoor space for said birds.
We know, most people probably thought this was already a requirement - it isn't, and as such, organic doesn't mean as much as it should when it comes to poultry. BUT that was set to change, and the official public comment period brought
47,000
YES
votes and a measly 28 NO votes. Easy, right?Well, those no votes came from some Big Ag industrial chicken facilities that would have to (gasp!) improve animal welfare standards to continue being certified organic, and that was apparently too much work for them.
So the USDA decided to toss out the rule, claiming that it was "regulatory overreach" to uphold rules for a voluntary program, and now we're left where we started - with an organic label that doesn't mean what most people think it does.
At least we still have all our wonderful small scale local farms in Northern Nevada! Unfortunately, we have no local poultry farms despite years of trying to get someone off the ground, but stay tuned - we might finally be able to change that in the next year or so!
EVERYONE IS WELCOME! Open every day from 8am-9pm
Our mailing address is:
240 Court St Reno, NV 89501
775.324.6133
info@greatbasinfood.coop
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