We’re asking customers to share what they love about their local natural products store. This month, the spotlight shines on one shopper’s experience at Just Food Co-op, Northfield, MN.

Serving Northfield, MN, residents since 2004, Just Food Coop focuses on sustainability and offers local, organic, and natural products. Most products in the store are organic, locally grown and/or produced, cooperatively owned, sustainably produced, and Fair trade certified.

Just Foodmakes the green lifestyle I value possible,” says co-op member Susannah Shmurak, a green living blogger who dishes on zero waste, foraging, and natural remedies at HealthyGreenSavvy.com,a blog devoted to practical shortcuts to an eco-friendly lifestyle. “Since it opened over a decade ago, it's become the main place I get food besides our beloved CSA,Open Hands Farm.”

Shmurak values living close to the co-op so she can bike or walk, and she loves the selection. “Organic options at grocery stores in town are pretty limited,” she notes, “and often more expensive.”

The co-op’s bulk aisle is another draw for Shmurak, who eats a mostly vegetarian diet and aims to limit use of plastics. Before COVID-19, she says, it was easy to minimize packaging waste. “I could bring a bag full of mason jars and fill them with organic oats, flour, sugar, coconut, beans, coffee, and spices. This not only slashed the plastic involved with our groceries, it saved us a ton of money.”

For more on Just Food, check outwww.justfood.coop. And don’t miss Shmurak’s new book,Everything Elderberry,​ which explores elderberry’s long history of medicinal use, what the latest research tells us about its effect on health, foraging and growing information, and includes more than 60 recipes for using elderberry and elderflower.