A Locally-sourced, Handmade Grocery Store With Prices to Match

There are plenty of restaurants out there that take the time and effort to make sure that the ingredients they use are locally sourced and of good quality, but Local Mission Eatery took the extra step of opening a small market to give shoppers access to its goods:

Supermarket deli counters everywhere mix up new batches of chicken salad every morning. Whole Foods has its cornucopia of prepared foods. But few such places insist on making nearly all their packaged foods themselves. From jams, ketchup, and cookie dough to pasta, almond milk, and baby food, the processed foods at Local Mission Market are processed on premises — hundreds of products altogether, says general manager David Dranitzke, whose background is in film production. Underlying that dedication to preparing foods in-house is the idea that convenient food doesn’t have to mean the lower quality typically found in the aisles of prepackaged products at standard supermarkets. At the same time, Local Mission Market wants to offer a full range of foods people expect from 21st-century U.S. food purveyors.

“We don’t want to be a boutique market,” Milgrom says. “We want to be a one-stop shop.”

Of course, a store that deems itself as “the first locally-sourced and handmade market” has prices that would match a boutique store — $7 for a container of ketchup made on the premises for example — though the locally sourced produce is better priced. I’m guessing, though, that if getting locally-sourced produce is important to you, you could probably join a CSA and have it be more cost-efficient, though Meaghan could answer that better than I could.

Support The Billfold

The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.