New Organic Garage Store opens in Vaughan

One of my favourite Organic Stores in Oakville - Organic Garage  just opened a second store in Vaughan.  I am super excited about this because I fell in love with Organic Garage when I filmed Heather who was the subject of a documentary I was working on about making environmental changes in diet choices.  Heather lives in Oakville so we filmed her trying to find products without wasteful packaging and also as close to local and Organic as we could find.  It was a challenge for Heather but Organic Garage had a lot of great products for Heather to switch to.  I liked how the store had a large variety of Organic products at prices that were competitive to your usual grocery store.   The Oakville store is a tiny little efficient store in a little strip mall in Oakville.   The new Vaughan store is just off Bathurst at New Westminster, it's just north of the Promenade Mall for those of you that live in Vaughan.  It takes over for a previous Organic store called Planet Organic I think that's what it was called.  I went there a few times and found the prices very high and the selection not that great, although they had a whole counter of prepared foods.  Organic Garage is a compact, efficient set up with great people running it.   They also have a huge boot at the Green Living Show in Toronto that I like to always stop by at to say hi and see what they have.  The people that run the store are really great and it's a pleasure shopping there.   On my visit today I saw Randi who takes care of all the marketing and she was surprised to see me there.  She thought I lived in Oakville near Heather I guess, I live in North York so this store is a lot closer to home.  But she was very happy to see me there.  It's always nice to support great shops with people that care about their customers.

On today's shopping trip I picked up a few things I like to get Organic and a few of my favourite things.   The things I like to buy organic are the Granny Smith Apples and the bacon and the turkey luncheon meat.   My favourite things I picked up were Camino Espresso chocolate, ShaShaBread cookies and Mad Mexican tortilla chips.  I also needed some white wine vinegar so I picked up a new kind to try and I also picked up some 100% buckwheat noodles that were on special.  I was inspired by a dish Gordon Ramsey made on tv before I left the house.    TIP:  Don't watch the food network or go to the grocery store hungry unless you want to buy a whole bunch of things you weren't planning on buying.

I also picked up a few other things like Organic tomatoes, another vegetable that is good to buy organic and I also picked up some bok choy because I could buy individual portions instead of a whole bag of them like they sell in Asian stores.  I find I use a few and then waste the rest.  This way I could buy 3 which is all I need to make a great Asian Soup.  By the way this bag of food was under $40, and I probably would have spent about $60 if I would have bought the same at Whole Foods.  I didn't even shop for deals, I just bought things I wanted.  They have a weekly flyer that they send by email to their mailing list if you are looking for the specials.

I hope that Organic Garage does well in these 2 locations and is able to open more stores in the future.  The only thing that I miss that Whole Foods has is their huge Cheese Section... yeah I am a cheesehead.    So I guess I will still have to hit more than one grocery store to fill my fridge and pantry but I hope to be able to shop at Organic Garage a lot more and get fresh Organic produce at a reasonable price closer to home now.