Grocery logistics
Mar. 7th, 2023 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
totientWhen grocery logistics suddenly got hard in March of 2020 I considered it to be a kind of giant Sudoku. Besides coping with the usual supply chain issues and the new grocery needs from my sudden switch to cooking instead of eating out, I also resolved to minimize my overall COVID impact and not just outsource all my risk via Instacart. Baldor's pivot from restaurant supply to home delivery helped a lot, as did the new curbside-only grocery in my neighborhood.
The new grocery approaches came with limited selections, but also access to new foods and new food sources. Each store was good at some things and bad at others. I compared different sources for quality and came to have strong preferences among them -- and also came to care more about the quality of the food I was eating and cooking with. And so now that supply chains are mostly back to normal and I could simplify my shopping, I'm still solving the sudoku every time.
I'm entering a low-contact phase in prep for a trip to visitnosebeepbear and so Sunday was a day to stock up on groceries. I did these in priority order -- the places I most want to shop for ethical and quality reasons tend also to be the ones with the spottiest selection.
So this meant a walk to Neighborhood Produce where I filled one grocery bag and was rewarded for leaving the other empty by finding something very useful put out for free on the curb on the way home; a bike ride to Market Basket where I filled my panniers; and finally a walk to When Pigs Fly and then to BFresh in Davis Square. This nicely filled up my fridge with all of the things that are hard to get delivered from SayWeee or Baldor. And now it's time to go put some orders together for those, so that I don't have to go into a store again before my trip.
The new grocery approaches came with limited selections, but also access to new foods and new food sources. Each store was good at some things and bad at others. I compared different sources for quality and came to have strong preferences among them -- and also came to care more about the quality of the food I was eating and cooking with. And so now that supply chains are mostly back to normal and I could simplify my shopping, I'm still solving the sudoku every time.
I'm entering a low-contact phase in prep for a trip to visit
nosebeepbear and so Sunday was a day to stock up on groceries. I did these in priority order -- the places I most want to shop for ethical and quality reasons tend also to be the ones with the spottiest selection.So this meant a walk to Neighborhood Produce where I filled one grocery bag and was rewarded for leaving the other empty by finding something very useful put out for free on the curb on the way home; a bike ride to Market Basket where I filled my panniers; and finally a walk to When Pigs Fly and then to BFresh in Davis Square. This nicely filled up my fridge with all of the things that are hard to get delivered from SayWeee or Baldor. And now it's time to go put some orders together for those, so that I don't have to go into a store again before my trip.
