The Price is Right

After filming a future Fresh Off the Press video in Toronto, we made a quick swing through New York.

On a beautiful Saturday afternoon, we stopped off at some of Manhattan's great gourmet supermarkets, including Eli's on the Upper East Side. As always, they had a spectacular assortment of hard-to-find culinary curiosities, including blood orange-infused olive oil, black currant apple juice, imported Italian capers in salt, and homemade Russian chocolate coffee babka. Then, in the midst of their grocery aisles, a familiar package appeared: Mom's Best Honey Grahams Cereal. And on it appeared a very unfamiliar price tag: $7.99. You can almost always buy it at Sprouts for $2.99.

There is no doubt that prices are higher in New York because it's harder to transport food there, and more expensive to build and maintain stores. And it's also true that with more corn being used for ethanol, with wheat prices out of sight, and fuel costs rising for just about everything having to do with farming, you're paying more at the registers than you did last year. Still!

Sometimes we lose sight of just how good the prices are at Sprouts. It's not just that we build modest stores and run a lean operation. It's a matter of corporate philosophy. We are absolutely, totally, rump-over-tea-kettle passionate about offering great values. Every conversation in our corporate office, every phone call our buyers make, is all about trying to drive down the price of healthful eating and offer a better value than our competitors do.

So, as much fun as it was to look at Eli's display of South American chocolate bars and their $9 price tags, or to contemplate what was so much better about the strawberries that were being sold in New York for $3.50 a pound at the same moment that ours were selling out west for as little as $1.49, we'll leave that for others to ponder. Nice place to visit, but we wouldn't want to go food shopping there.

From the July, 2011 edition of Fresh Off the Press