Weaver Street Market Product Selection
By Ruffin Slater, General Manager
As a co-op, we strive to sell products that offer the best possible value to our owners and the community. We seek products that meet your tastes, and that also meet the values we have established as a co-op. We have recently updated our Product Statement, and want to share with you the criteria that we use for selecting products for Weaver Street Market and Panzanella.

First and foremost, we carry as many products as possible that fulfill our mission:

1. Our primary focus is to provide quality products that are sustainably produced, artisanal, local, healthful, humanely raised, and reflect fair trade practices. We feature and promote these products. We seek out and cultivate suppliers for these products and produce them ourselves.In a perfect world, all of our products would fall into this first category. However, there are not enough of these products available to fill our shelves and restaurant menu, so we also carry a second group of products that allow for one-stop shopping.
2. We also carry products that respond to our community’s desires, including convenience foods, less-expensive choices, and foods important to our culture and tastes. We select these products through a dialogue with our community that considers our buying ability, product and supplier attributes, and customer requests.
   
3. Finally, there is a third group of products that we refuse to carry. These are products that are harmful to our health, our society, or our environment. These include tobacco products, meat produced with antibiotics and growth hormones, foods with harmful additives, and endangered seafood. Beginning in January 2008, we have added foods with trans fats and high fructose corn syrup to this category. It’s important for us to make a statement about these products by refusing to stock them.

We don’t sell seafood that is over-fished or endangered, or farmed using aquaculture methods that are ecologically destructive. It is clear that the issues surrounding sustainable seafood are complex and evolving, so we will continue to monitor reliable sources for new information. We believe that we should be selective in our choice of seafood. It is the best way to express our value that, over the long term, high quality seafood should be available to us all, and sustainable management and production is the only way to ensure that this occurs.

On our website, we maintain a list of products that we don’t carry, where we also cite the information that has caused us to fore go those products. We carry thousands of products from hundreds of suppliers. By necessity, we rely on the representations of our suppliers with respect to product integrity. We endeavor to verify these representations, and we are forthcoming with any significant lapse where we stock a product we didn’t intend to.

The Product Statement results from a directive from the Board of Directors that the General Manager formulates a product statement that is in keeping with WSM’s mission (which we call our “Ends Policy). For more information about our food policy, email our Head Merchandiser, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , with your suggestions. By working together, we can ensure that Weaver Street Market's products are a reflection of our tastes and our values.