The Importance of Ethics and Values Where You Shop for Fuel for Your Self, Family and Pets - Colorado's Great Examples

YOUsers of Lumigrate might know that Lumigrate launched in 2009 with a link on our products tab to Vitamin Cottage, which is a Colorado-based company which started in the mid 1950s. I grew up very near that part of the Denver area, but my family was not into 'health foods' or supplements, ironically.

We drove right near them to shop at Safeway, where I would negotiate with my mother to pay the extra few cents, about 10% more, for a non house brand of white bread because the roof of my mouth got rubbed less and I could eat the crusts. "If you promise to not feed the crusts to your puppy under the table (my puppy was a dog that wouldn't be sellable from our commercial kennel (golden retrievers) as she had a cleft palate, my parents were very concerned with ethics in breeding and we kept any of the dogs that might have anything wrong and did not breed them, or if Xrays showed hip displasia, they were euthanized. Too much of THAT lead to a 'no more' from my father after many years of having to do a lot of the heart-wrenching trips to and from the vet and out to the pet cemetary on the property.  

That puppy ended up doing well, by the way, she survived no getting my crusts under the table in the mornings, but was outside when there were some coyotes around and it was presumed she was taken by them as a meal, though my mother did place an ad in the local paper, and I'm pretty sure she knew I'd expect to see it in the paper so she wasn't just acting like she called them. 

FIFTY YEARS LATER, it was so interesting to be having a conversation about making gluten free and low carb or not so low carb breads after attending Building Meals for Superhero Health with other attendees and Dustin McFarland, CNC, my local area store's Nutritional Health Coach, who had presented to a group of about fifteen people at 11 am on a weekday.  I'd talked with him last year when we were both leaving the store at the same time, I had been several days by then frazzled over finding out what was going on with SpoildeyCat and having had Bach Flower Remedies recommended, which Natural Grocers carries. I'd tried some of their mix called 'Rescue Remedy' for pets but it hadn't done the trick.

The floor clerk who had helped me on that trip had tried to lead me to a specific remedy, he had experience in life as a ferrier (horse shoer) and I just thought I'd stick with what a former homeopath had suggested, which was the mixed product. Turns out the big time cat expert I'd made my way on the phone to talk to in California had recommended the exact thing the former ferrier had. Sometimes it takes hearing something more than once before you 'do it', in sorting through so many issues and choices and paths of things to do possibly. Unfortunately, she had a genetic disorder that there is no known solution for so was euthanized later in the month, this is about a year ago now. But I'd initially purchased all her food from Natural Grocers, but I noticed they now carry the brand that was at the Colorado-based Chow Down pet supply storie, a raw frozen or dehdrated food, for both cats and dogs. It was so impressive to see how she did differently with different foods, and her favorite part of the day was when I'd get into the spinach clamshell containers and she could carry away as many leaves as she wanted, like they were mice or birds she'd caught. Per the DVM homeopathic expert, it was VERY unusual she craved spinach when I got her, and until she was about 2 years old. After that it was my fish oil so I got her fish oil from Natural Grocers. They've just become part of my Colorado 'tradition' in these last 18 years I've shopped with them.

I'd wanted to see what Natural Grocers was doing with their seminars lately. The folks at our videos tab were some of the first to present at the local store, back before they exanded and had a dedicated little room (overly air conditioned and lit for my liking with cold white paint on the walls, it's my least favorite venue ever for attending a seminar, but providing that space in the store is an investment and shows their 'value' on education.)  In the past, when they first started doing seminars back at the time Lumigrate's providers were intact in a clinic and I was in charge of getting the seminar series off the ground (with their admin help), they'd have 50 people sometimes, in a V shape in the back corner of the store and if anyone shopping wanted items in those areas they or staff would have to climb over the seated attendees.

And I went to every seminar for a long time, but after a while you've seen a lot of the information and attendance drops, so I felt this was a very good number of people in the room. But I couldn't help but notice that there were some awesome suggestions in the room, of uses for products sold in the store, and it was going "I'll bring Dustin the recipe" -- Or people were talking about The Oiling of America video and the book that they sell authored by the same gal -- it would be fun 'connections' to have those things on a social media-type sight somewhere. It would possibly allow for deeper connections within the community -- there were some really neat people in the room! (And they gave away a LOT of really good items for the giveway too, I was shocked.) 

At that time they had a service where you could order online and they'd ship to people --- anywhere in the US, I believe, and perhaps beyond; foods, supplements and other products. I thought that was a great 'fit' for Lumigrate's YOUsers, and I was aware in our first year of more than a couple people who either went to a store after learning from Lumigrate they were a great resource, or they ordered online. In one case it was someone rather bedridden who made a lot of progress overall with their health, but there needed to be more expertise given to those purchasers with supplements and nutrition combined with other factors, such as medications, etc.  

(Then we also selected the links at Amazon for people who might prefer using that if they were more comfortable with Amazon, but then Amazon quit doing business with Colorado based companies because Colorado was one of the first to close up the gap for collecting sales tax on Internet sales).  Keep in mind, Lumigrate started to come together in 2008, the year of the economic problems in the US and beyond. So we had tons of monkey wrenches right from the start -- same as I'm sure Vitamin Cottage's founder did back in the 1950s. 

So in late 2009 when I talked with one of the company's mangement staff about why the rebranding was occurring from Vitamin Cottage to Natural Grocers, I believe they told me --- and were the FIRST to raise my 'awareness' -- about Codex Alamentarius. Now that 2013 came and went, and I went down the rabbit holes of education and learning that I did and came to "Codex" again, this time to learn about it more fully, I think about how much the Natural Grocers business had to shift in order to stay viable going forward as all the changes come through that are part of Codex.

(Agenda 21 and ICLEA in terms of areas of the world being developed for people to live and have goods transported dovetails into Codex as does Common Core in education, which some people have heard about if they're teachers or have kids in school....  I have covered these in other topics on Lumigrate and strongly suggest people learn enough about 'that stuff' as soon as possible, as everything, even related to foods and supplements, will make more sense when you do.)  

Natural Grocers stopping the online ordering lead me to find another Colorado based company which provided good supplement advise and products, ITC Compounding and Natural Wellness Pharmacy. We enjoyed working together in 2011 and 2012 but one of the co-founders became ill and died from pancreatic cancer just as their business environment was undergoing changes that have to do with shifts in what medical providers and clinics 'outside the box' doing; some are going out of business and there's a lot of shifting of who's working for whom.

Hence, I turned to a new format on Lumigrate and recently have exclusively been creating the content at Lumigrate as it takes a long time to develop relationships with the experts and how Lumigrate works etc... I was preferring to find people who weren't 'all over the Internet' so we had unique expertise writing, but sometimes I would have to help them register as users and sometimes they weren't really keyboarding writers so I'd write for them from what they verbalized.

I'd hoped that perhaps this company would fund Lumigrate in some way where we could help them get their message out to the public and they could help us stay viable providing content for the YOUsers to learn from. But when I got to looking at what they were doing -- massively expanding to other states and opening 15 new stores a year for at least two years in a row now, it just seemed like they had to get shifted before they'd know what they'd want to collaborate on. So here I was, finally feeling like the time might be right to plug back in and at least see what they were doing.

In 2009 I met with several members of their corporate staff, briefly, at their 'flagship' store, which I call their 'mothership' since the company's offices are located attached to it. For a year in the late 1990s I shopped at that store and lived within a mile of it, but I'd started shopping at their Cherry Creek store in 1996 when I moved to Denver after completing 18 years in Fort Collins living and working in everything from air quality research to occupational therapy and health education at the student health center for Colorado State University. I had gone GF/DF (and egg free) in 1995 so had my eyes peeled in my new Denver neighborhood; I was doing my internships at the Denver VA which was located near the CU Medical center.

I was eating a lot of Mexican food because I could eat corn and beans, so noticed a place I'd never heard of called 'Chipotle'; it turns out that was their #2 store and they'd never served someone who didn't want a flour tortilla, so we created the 'burrito bowl' and naked burrito together. Yes, my claim to fame.... They didn't have anything but the red baskets and foil, so they'd double up foil for the lining and put one over the top and trust me to bring the red basket back. I would do that on Thursdays as in my University OT time it was my big treat to watch Friends at 7 pm on Thursdays. You might know recognize the brand Chipotle, they've been busier than ever at the one store in my city, now living for a decade in the far west end of Colorado by Utah -- in 2014 they went GMO-free. And they've done some other things for advertising their message, such as a 'miniseries now showing' per their drink cups' marketing. 

These are a few things from the Natural Grocers' website I thought I'd bring here for YOUsers: 

On a tab about advocacy -- link: www.naturalgrocers.com/advocacy/advocacy-federal-state-and-community-regulation-and-planning

We realize that political and social advocacy is a process of implementing incremental improvement over time to achieve a better world. One advantage to being nearly sixty years old is that we have seen many great improvements. The other advantage is that we know that falling backward is an ever-present threat. If you see Natural Grocers aggressively pursuing an issue, be assured we have good reason!

And check back here to find out what that reason is.