Purpose
This policy formalizes Origins Grocer’s commitment to building a resilient local economy and generating positive economic development in the San Diego region by (1) buying from local and independent businesses and (2) serving predominantly local customers from the communities we exist to benefit.
Commitments
Supplier Commitments
- We commit to prioritizing local independent businesses when making our purchasing decisions, specifically through our goal to purchase at least 50% of our non-labor expenses from independent suppliers local to our stores.
- For products that cannot be sourced locally, we prioritize regional independent suppliers.
Customer Commitments
- We are committed to serving the North Park and South Park neighborhoods of San Diego where we operate our two stores. In accordance with our mission and values, we exist to provide simple, clean ingredients that harm neither the health of the people who live in our local communities nor the health of our planet.
- While we warmly welcome visitors from outside our communities, our aim is to maintain a customer base that is at least 75% local.
- We actively engage our local customer base through community events, local partnerships, and other initiatives to engage customers around our products as well as increase access to healthy, sustainable products. We proudly host partner organizations to host convenings in our space and we actively seek out additional opportunities to partner with aligned community and business associations.
How We Measure Our Commitments
- We actively research potential local suppliers for product categories, and we build networks with local associations and groups.
- We maintain a database of current suppliers with location and ownership information.
- We track the percentage of our expenses going to local, independent suppliers.
- We provide feedback to help local producers meet our quality and packaging standards.
- We connect local suppliers with resources to grow their businesses and meet high standards of sustainability.
- We track the percentage of our customers who are local through our payment processor that automatically gathers and reports zip codes as well as phone numbers associated with customers’ cards. (Please note that we only report this data in aggregate and only track this data anonymously. We do not store this data in a way that could identify someone personally. We comply with all state and federal laws and regulations surrounding consumer privacy, protection, and data security, including the California Consumer Privacy Protection Act.)