If you love to cook, you love your spices. For years we have used Penzeys Spices; they're super fresh and the blends are especially delicious (like the salt free Mural of Flavor for example). We would always get the larger plastic packages to refill our glass jars, but after a while that didn’t feel quite right. Can’t we find some spices that haven't been wrapped in plastic?
We were at Sprouts Farmers Market, one of our local grocery stores, and sure enough they had spices in bulk! Of course you could scoop your spices into their available plastic bags, but we planned ahead and brought our own light-weight containers and measured up exactly the amount we wanted.
When we went to pay, the check-out assistant could not have been more helpful. She said that next time we could bring in our glass spice jars if we wanted and weigh them before we filled them; that way we would only be charged for the amount we bought. She weighed one of our empty containers at that point and it came in at a quarter of an ounce. Now that we know our containers only weigh a quarter of an ounce, we're just going to keep using those and skip the pre-weighing process.
So off we went with our bulk-bought spices and refilled our spice containers at home. So easy and no plastic necessary! We hope more grocery stores start offering items in bulk, and how great would it be if Penseys started selling their products in bulk as well.