Shop With Me At A WholeSale Produce Market

A few weeks ago my aunt who lives in Massachusetts told me about a Wholesale Produce Market near her that has everything packaged in cardboard boxes. She said I should find out if there was anything like that near me. Lo and behold I found out that there is a Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market and this weekend I went on an adventure to check it out!

I wanted to put together a blog post on our experience at the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market and include some tips to know before you go shopping at a wholesale produce market too. 

The way these wholesale markets work is that you buy things by the case instead of just one or two single items. Oftentimes this involves no packaging or just cardboard box packaging, making it a zero-waste dream, however this also means you have to buy a larger quantity of produce than you may be used to buying. 

This was essentially a giant warehouse, it felt like we were in the back of a BJ's or Costco. There was a guardrail too with a pedestrian sidewalk so that we could stay out of the way of workers on forklifts. Outside of that it was set up with different vendor stations similar to a farmer's market for bulk buying.

My Tips Before You Go: 

• Make sure you read the website thoroughly before you go to make sure that the general public is allowed to shop there
• Read the hours carefully, the market we went to was open from 9 am - Noon and then open again 7 pm - 11 am the next morning. 
• Bring Cash! Most of the vendors only took cash so it was a good thing we had some.
• Read the website thoroughly: where we went there was a $1 fee for parking which we luckily knew in advance from the website! There may be other small things like that at places near you so be sure to read everything you can in advance. 

We didn't bring any bags with us since we assumed we wouldn't need any and we were right, they did have carts that customers could grab and fill up with boxes as they went. But nothing we bought would have fit into a bag.

For this trip we didn't really have a list with us because we weren't 100% sure what we would be able to find. However, we knew that we wanted to get a case of broccoli because anytime we have broccoli in our dinners for the week we never seem to have enough. Well, we found broccoli alright. A case of 18 crowns of broccoli and it only cost us $8 which was huge!

We left happy with our purchase and went home to immediately begin blanching our broccoli. It took us 3 days of batches to work through but now we have broccoli for probably at least 6 months. If you also have a small household or live alone, one idea is to see if any of your friends or neighbors would like to go half/half with you on the produce you get. This way you can split the cost and not have quite as much produce stored away if you're worried about not getting to it all on time. 

Have you ever shopped at a wholesale produce market before? What was your experience like? Some photos from our trip are below!