Not Your Average Grocer
If there’s one thing we know around here, it’s that at Provisions, we’re not your average grocer. People come from all over the city to find that one amazing, rare item we happen to carry, just as much as we have a crowd of regulars who pick up everything they need from us. It’s not just our unique collection of products, though, or even our crew of diverse personalities. It’s in the way we source those products, and it’s in the way those products are made. From your more-than-basic milk and eggs to the specialty foods you never thought you’d find in Fort Greene, we strive to find and carry items that are local, sustainable, and ethically made, all held to a high standard of quality.
Many if not most grocery stores source exclusively from corporate distributor middlemen, and they in turn source from industrial farms and factories where there’s little to no transparency. It makes for a hard disconnect on where food comes from, especially when food is mistreated and wasted in the name of perfectly identical, shelf-ready products. The people who make these foods are likely to be vastly underpaid and overworked. Both people and animals suffer under these systems that are not sustainable, and yet as an individual it can seem daunting to get around it. That’s where we come in.
At Provisions, we are constantly looking for more ways to do our part toward a better, more viable food system where people and the food that nourishes them can thrive. Our milk and eggs come from farms where animals are treated like part of the family, with expansive pastures to roam, diverse grazing, and even biweekly pedicures for the cows. We source produce from small operations from as nearby as Gotham Greens in Gowanus, and our butcher counter lets no scrap go to waste when they make animal fat soaps and candles. We’ve written extensively, too, about where our beef, pork, lamb, and chicken all comes from.
“Ugly” items from other departments find new and tasty life in our prepared foods, like our daily soups and Greene Bowls. Our whole store contributes to our compost bins, whether it’s food scraps from the kitchen, used coffee grounds from our coffee bar, or even unusable fat and bone from our butcher counter. (Sorry if you’ve been around when we wheel those particular bins out! Phew!) When it comes to stocking our shelves, we work directly with many small producers who hold the same values of sustainability and transparency in their ingredients and production. All in all, we recognize we are but one small store in Brooklyn, but we also think it’s worth recognizing that every action toward a more sustainable future, however small, counts toward a big impact.
