I have gathered another bulk store membership card in my wallet, which I am excited about, and I have my one day off tomorrow, so armed with the plan to sleep until lunchtime before enjoying a leisurely walk around Restaurant Depot (“RD”), I have tucked myself into bed with my laptop to rigorously compare prices across all the wholesalers that I frequent.
As something of a homemaker, though less at home in these last seven years, and currently more like a breadwinning/breadmaker hybrid, the first thing I want to look at are baking ingredients.
The base of choice lately, whole wheat flour, specifically the fine-textured chakki atta, sells in bags of twenty pounds for $16 at my usual big box chain. It’s not available at RD but RD instead has a dozen different white flours in twenty-five and fifty pounds bags. So my first comparison can’t be made. Not to worry, my kitchen is described by the slur “ingredient household” so there will be plenty more direct comparisons to make.
One interesting RD item that I’ve not yet encountered on my adventures is Pillsbury creme cake base— it looks like it approximates a plain boxed cake mix but for muffins and breakfast or dessert breads, in fifty pound bags for $45. If I knew where to store all that dry mix, or if I decide to dive into airtight food-grade buckets, maybe I’ll add it to the cart. As it seems, skimming the ingredient list, this might be something that I can mimic at home in much smaller portions. I bookmark the item for future potential purchase anyway.
I can get a pound of Knox gelatin for about $18, too, which is so much cheaper than the Wegmans mark-up that I currently suffer. In the high noon of summer, a bucket of that stuff will come in hand for all the fruit to preserve. For nostalgic imitation vanilla, especially when trying to achieve that birthday-cake-taste, a half-dozen quarts come bundled as a case for a little less than $9.50 right now because it’s on sale from its usual $11. Or it’s available straight in a gallon jug for a similar enough price that the conveniently sized smaller bottles go into my shopping cart. The herbs and spices are all, per ounce, the best I’ve yet to see, but my husband already complains about the maze of navigating that cabinet, so I won’t be getting more. It’s nice to know that once I start to run out, RD has all my normal varieties on hand.
By the nature of catering to food business, RD stocks so many different brands of all sorts of things. If the price is the same as my other warehouses, then the amounts are the same, if not slightly larger, at RD. Continuing in my online exploration, the canned goods: fruits, beans, vegetables, tomato products, sauces, soups— a dozen more choices in each category. And frozen staples, not fully prepared, but more like the pieces of a dish, precooked or parboiled or raw. Building blocks and interchangeable for the needs of each RD customer. Every product is much more broken down into individual ingredients or components than bulk warehouses geared toward the average American grocery shopper. I can get ten pounds of frozen raspberries by themselves for $30 rather than raspberries sparsely dimpling a bag of frozen mixed berry blend (read: mostly strawberry, to which I have an allergy).
I don’t run a restaurant, but I ask my husband his opinion on operating a once-in-a-while roadside bakery stand. Pennsylvania, legally, requires permitting and inspection, but it’s rarely enforced. I’ve lived in a lot of places with extremely relaxed cottage food laws so seeing these requirements is a shock, but not enough to dissuade me from the idea, especially if it’s not something that gets strictly policed. From what I gather, as long as I’m not pissing off competition or making people sick, the law won’t come knocking. Church bake sales and lemonade stands aren’t getting busted or it’d be in the news. The bakery stand idea is in-progress, mostly because I’m trying to figure out what exactly my business is shifting toward.
Either way, a roadside stand is an excuse, poorly masked, to frequent RD. There’s a sense of security in buying bulk. Armchair and professional psychologists must have explanations at the ready, but I don’t look any of them up. I’m sure I fall in line with whatever they have to say on the matter, but it doesn’t bother me. I take satisfaction in keeping my family fed and knowing there’s a next meal to follow, and the root of that feeling doesn’t need to be examined. But. Maybe I can’t pull my head out of the clouds and the future that I want, with my subsistence farming and self-sufficiency and becoming a cornerstone in my community. And in that future, cellars and pantries stocked to make it through winter and economic upheaval.
Raccoon Commune Co. 