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A local butcher started doing delivery where I live and they deliver incredibly high quality meat. It’s been a revelation.

I combine that with two other sources for delivery: Costco via Instacart, which gets you all the bulk needs and some produce, basically you never have to worry about quality.

And then Amazon Fresh for cheap staples and pantry items. We have a really high quality vegetarian market too that delivers on Instacart.

If you do it wrong, you essentially will have a bad time. Amazon has horrible meat and not great produce, but Costco and the local butcher have amazing stuff.

I used to hate shopping for groceries online, but in all honesty it’s gotten quite good if you live in the right area and figure out good places to look. I’ve changed my mind.

How did you go about finding a local butcher, I’ve found locally that this isn’t like a thing where people have a large web presence & giant “this is where you should be buying meat” lit signs pointing the way

I always find the best local food sources from word of mouth. Usually there's not a large web presence because web is extra overhead, and high quality food has a much higher demand than supply so there's no need for it. A good place to meet local people to talk about food is a farmer's market.

I dunno, I guess I just think of things differently, when I move, the first thing I do is look for the local butchers, delis or produce shops, they've almost always got the best quality for price outside of farm fresh stuff. Bulk stuff is always a planned trip to scrounge all the best bulk sections around. Wandering into random food stores you find on your travels and discovering little stores selling spices or vegetables you've never seen before. Fighting with little old ladies over the best cheese in the Italian deli.

I enjoy that stuff. Food brings me joy. Finding and choosing the best ingredients for the stuff I make has always been something i've enjoyed. Well, once I learned to cook well enough that I came to appreciate it.

These things that come as revelations were always available to you. I may be being presumptuous to you and the other commenters, but it seems to be more that the change in routine and living situations has caused a lot of people to reassess their food in general.

These things are great and positive. I may just be overly pessimistic, but I worry for that everyone like you and the others, there's ten others who never think about it and continue on as is, in a more convenient and ever disconnected way.

I feel like there's a good way and bad way this could all play out. I guess I'm just most worried that rather than small local businesses getting their stuff out there, they'll get drowned out by the big players that are going to start dropping into this market hard. It could go either way. I just really don't want to see it got the big corporate route yet again.

Like you and others say, this is an opportunity for small local businesses to get out their and I have seen it first hand. At my current job I share space with a new small local organic produce delivery company and those are the kinds of people I'd like to see do well from this.

> Fighting with little old ladies over the best cheese in the Italian deli.

Where can I do this?

Well, in vancouver on commercial drive at the Santa Barbara is where I used to go. They get pretty ruthless. Or cioffi's on Hastings...but that place was bit more chill. Still always busy though.

Hey, a chacun sa vérité.

I do miss the Italian deli that closed. It’s not that we don’t frequent the corner markets and farmers markets either! And again, the delivery we get is a small local butcher, and I imagine once things open up we’ll visit when we have time.

I think of online as replacing just the droll half, or when times in a pinch. The pantry items, milk. It saves time for trips to my favorite deli. No more DFW-commencement-speech Safeway coupon rush hour traffic jams. More time for the farmers market!

You sound like a nostalgic grandpa pining for the good old days that are passing, but to be honest, if anything the online half has opened up a lot of room for fun excursions in the real world. I share the hope that local businesses thrive as well. The Asian fish market ladies certainly know me better than before. One not need replace the other, but the optionality has made things dramatically better for me, at least.

> DFW-commencement-speech Safeway coupon rush hour traffic jams

Has this is water become so widely known that we can simply reference it in conversation like this?

>You sound like a nostalgic grandpa pining for the good old days that are passing

I'm really glad I'm not actually a nostalgic grandpa at 30...I feel like i would probably have made some pretty poor life choices along the way.

I agree with this so much. I’ve been doing grocery delivery this entire time and have revived my passion for cooking, but I am deeply frustrated by the process of selection.

To make good food you need good ingredients, and cost and brand are not valid proxies. I need to see, smell, touch to select and nothing has been able to replace that.

I’m hoping the disruption of supply chains will lead to a hyperlocal food revolution. I’ve been focused on eating local for a long time, but I’d love to see it spread. Part of that though is finding the producers and building relationships, being conscientious in how you source your ingredients. Buying online hides this all from you behind a narrative that may not match reality.

For those reasons, I really hope online doesn’t kill grocery. I’m lucky to have such a great local grocery chain, and I’m hoping they come out the other end of this strong.

If you really cook there's no way to separate the market shopping from the cooking. If I need tomatoes for sauce or I need them for slicing, that's two completely different criteria for tomatoes. Would I pay some rando to bring me a pound of peaches? Definitely not. I wouldn't even ask my wife to go get the peaches. Honestly, do not understand how produce shopping can happen online. Obviously you can order Rice Krispies or whatever.

My tactic during quarantine has been to order larger quantities of produce and then find recipes suitable for what I receive. I've also been trending towards root vegetables and citrus over other forms of produce, because the variability doesn't have as much impact on my cooking. All that said, you're absolutely right. When you are trying to make something specific you need just the right ingredients and the difference between two tomatoes or different apples can be critically important.

I agree that I strongly prefer picking it out myself, but a lot of meat and produce would also stay fresher longer if it weren't on display (stored in basically suboptimal conditions) for hours and days. So there are some potential gains in food waste reduction that could offset that.

Think about how often people pick out some meat and then instead of putting it back, it sits on a shelf somewhere or by the register. Another anecdote is from when I had a CSA with my ex a few years ago and I was talking to the farmer. He said that he used to let people pick out things like tomatoes but switched to sorting it out himself. He'd start the day with basically 90%+ perfectly good tomatoes, and end the day with at least a third of it bruised and damaged from people picking and squeezing.

I find that my interaction with food has changed in a pretty complex way. We have not spent a dollar on carry out or dining since February — what was once a spending category we budgeted on has gone to $0. We’ve been doing online grocery shopping and I’m not sure if we will go back. We have herb & tomato gardening going on and we’ve been making a big deal of it with my daughter, and I’m making our bread from bulk flour deliveries. And I just tried moving our meat purchasing out of grocery but we will see how that goes. I thought I’d feel more disconnected but as part of this whole reshuffling I find it more nuanced.

I used to think the same thing about needed to choose produce myself, but after doing Whole Foods delivery about 20 times since covid hit, I've had mostly great results with quality.

Maybe this is just Whole Foods, and maybe it's my area San Francisco, so YMMV with other stores in other locations.

It’s probably Whole Foods. We always seem to get apples covered in bruises.

>I don't like online grocery shopping and hope that it never fully replaces grocery stores.

Your opinion is the exact opposite of mine. While I think it won't replace grocery stores, I do think it has brought more flexibility to the process.

As for respect, I've never considered food production and distribution anything other than another business type.

Luckily, a local farmer's market has no contact pick up, so we've been able to use it.

During the pandemic we've had everything as a no contact pickup or delivery. We've saved a great deal of time and actually spend less on groceries per month than we did in the past.

The only issue we have is sometimes items are out of stock by the time the pick up or delivery happens. Well, that and we panic bought industrial size toilet rolls due to FOMO. At least we have TP for the next year.

Like everything in life it depends. I started using a local online grocery delivery service last year. Before, I have to go to several small market and spend a few hours trying to find good vegetables and meat. The delivery service now does that and charge a bit higher than local rates. He does not own inventory but rather go to buy food from his trusted sources. The result is high quality vegetables/meat than I can get on my own and also delivered to my door the next day (or at the end of the day).

If you want to buy your own food yourself it'd help if you live somewhere gentrified. It would make sense to use your community and you only need to step out of your apartment's building to find the grocery and the bakery. But if you live 3-4 km from the nearest one, the delivery service is a life-saver.

> Things like fresh produce, dairy and meat I need to choose myself

The thing is, you don’t need to, you prefer to.

Plus if you’re buying meat at a grocery store, you’re already so removed from the source of your food that letting somebody else pick it out is like adding another inch to a marathon.

> but it should never become the only option

It won't. Besides, we already live in a world with in-store shopping only groceries, hybrid (where you can do both, like Whole Foods), and online-only (like Peapod or Schwan's, which has been around since well before "online" ordering was around).

There's not a lot to worry about. In-person/in-store grocery shopping is not going away but it will be complemented by online and online/offline grocery shopping. This is really the same path that so many other product verticals have taken in recent years and so it's really no surprise.

I totally agree. Personally, I'd like to grow as much food as I can in my own backyard and supplement it with grocery stores for things I can't produce myself.

Check out Farm Fresh To You.

It's a natural progression for supermarkets. If you want to choose things yourself go to a small markets, farmer's markets, local butchers, greengrocers, bakery etc.