These statistics beg the question: If bulk is such good business, why does it lurk in the shadows of most supermarkets?

In a word: brands. The essential role packaging has come to play in marketing and advertising over the last century cannot be overstated. “Once you take away all of the labels, marketing, and pre-packaged portion sizes, you’re left with food that tells you almost nothing, aside from whether you’re the kind of person who picks through the granola bin when you think no one is watching,” observed writer Rebecca Flint Marx in a meditation for Heated on the oddities of bulk shopping. “Food without this kind of accompanying narrative is an increasingly rare commodity, in both the grocery store and the public consciousness.” The ad-averse nature of bulk has made it undesirable territory for many brands, who depend on their packaging to tell their story. And where brands go, grocery stores tend to follow.

For decades, big brands have called the shots in the grocery sector, even if they don’t actually operate supermarkets. As The Counter has previously reported, grocers have effectively outsourced their marketing to the big consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies; it is food companies, not supermarket chains, that we typically see spending millions on prime-time TV ad buys. Supermarkets’ allegiance to household-name food brands—who don’t appreciate the anonymity in the bulk section and have quality control concerns about selling their goods loose—has helped to diminish the status of bulk. And though the alliance between food companies and grocery stores has frayed somewhat, most grocery chains still view Big CPG as a key partner in their success.

That’s meant that innovation in the bulk sector has largely come (if it’s come at all) from outside sources, and not from supermarkets themselves. The companies and nonprofit groups battling on bulk’s behalf typically have agendas of their own, whether it’s reducing waste, increasing social equity, improving public health, or simply finding a way to break into a less competitive, potentially lucrative area of the supermarket. All these groups tend to agree on one thing: the bulk section is just too user-unfriendly for its own good.



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Eva Holman, a program manager at UPSTREAM Solutions, a nonprofit which lobbies against single-use plastic, thinks the neglect of bulk is a shame due to the section’s vast, untapped waste-reduction potential. In one focus group she ran in San Francisco, participants’ indicated their biggest concerns about bulk food shopping was resoundingly cleanliness. “They don’t want to shop in a funky, dark, dirty bulk food experience,” she said. “Not that plastic’s clean per se, but people have this illusion of it being a clean and safe protector.”

“Right now, when you go to the hippie bulk food aisle, the experience sucks,” said David Conway, an entrepreneur based in the San Francisco Bay area, whose business SmartBins is intent on reinventing this overlooked aisle of food retail. “We’re trying to change that and make it a more friendly experience.”