InFocus Magazine

“Our mandate is it has to taste good, it has to support the economy, and it has to help the producers make a living,” says Angeline Street, with husband James and their kids inside Brambles Market in Downtown Courtenay.

Photo by Photo by Boomer Jerritt

These days it’s quite possible to go out grocery shopping and for very few dollars you can score yourself a fresh-from-Hawaii pineapple that tastes like it just recently left a Maui plantation.

Angeline Street has no problem with our ability to do that, and she confesses that there are times she has a hankering for out-of-season strawberries and will make that purchase, knowing the strawberries didn’t originate here.  At the same time the philosophy and marketing belief she shares with her husband and business partner James is to encourage a local and healthful connection for your grocery marketing wants and needs.  The bonus is, the Streets provide access to localized shopping.

That’s partially what Brambles Market is all about, though it’s also more than that.  The ‘more’ part is for us, the consuming public, to be able to explore the wonders of our foodstuffs, their purchase and how much better the eating and family feeding experiences can be with a shift in long-held attitudes about convenience and access.

“Our mandate is it has to taste good, it has to support the economy, and it has to help the producers make a living,” says Angeline.

Brambles Market has just celebrated a year in business at its site in Downtown Courtenay, on 4th Street across from the Courtenay Museum.  Situated in a highly popular spot that boasts a rather European town square ambience—what with a popular coffee bar and café with its extensive patio, as well as a gelato purveyor—Brambles effectively completes the picture.

“We saw a need,” Angeline says quite simply of their inspiration for bringing Brambles into being.  With her long background in retail, and James’ training as a chef, food purveying seemed like a natural.  That, combined with their beliefs, was the guiding force behind their move into the former Island Inkjet site.

“What we had come to realize was that a lot of small producers couldn’t sell their meat and produce to the big supermarkets,” Angeline says.  “They had no outlet other than the Farmers’ Market, and not everybody goes to the market.  While the larger stores take some local produce, for example, that access has been diminishing.”

The other belief revolves around buying locally whenever possible, followed by items from elsewhere on Vancouver Island, and ultimately from the rest of the province.  She notes they had arrived at this local purchasing conclusion well before the now widely-embraced 100-mile-diet came into vogue.  At the same time, the renewed boost by the 100-mile philosophy was welcomed because it both raised public awareness and gave a nice boost to business.  It was a good bit of synchronicity, Angeline says.

“People have no idea about the array of local items that can be bought,” she says.  “Of course there are exceptions to this, and we’re certainly not fanatical about it.”

She notes that various fruits like bananas and oranges obviously don’t grow here. Likewise, if you are fond of rice and rice dishes, it has to be imported.  But, at the same time, people will automatically buy a certain brand of, say, flour, and be understandably oblivious to the fact that there is flour available—carried by Brambles—that is grown and milled on Vancouver Island.

“Part of our role is to provide access not just to the obvious items like fresh produce, but also to brands packaged on Vancouver Island,” she says.

While the current store is fine for their needs at the moment, Angeline says they would ultimately like to be bigger.

“We started the process five to six years ago,” she says.  “Once the book (The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating, by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon www.100milediet.org/book) came out, along with the TV show, we really started thinking seriously about it.  From there we had to find a place and financing for it.”

One of the motivations they wanted to satisfy with Brambles, she says, was to recognize that, as affectionately regarded as the Farmers’ Market is amongst Valley residents, it has its limitations.  There were gaps.  Brambles was designed to fill in those gaps.

“There are many other options beyond meat, bread and vegetables,” Angeline says.  “We can provide those in terms of products that originate locally or on the Island.  You want to buy frozen French fries?  We have those but they don’t come from McCain’s—they come from Victoria.  For a while we were offering, though sadly it’s no longer available, Worcestershire sauce from Saltspring Island.”

As far as competition goes, the opening of Brambles begs the question as to whether Edible Island doesn’t have that market sewn up locally.  Angeline says their direct competition isn’t actually Edible Island, but the Courtenay Thrifty Foods store.  In that context, she says, any chain supermarket gets a huge customer base because of not only the vast array of products available, but also due to shopper habits. It is those habits that Brambles wants to change.  And thus far they are succeeding nicely.

Human beings are creatures of habit, Angeline asserts, and contemporary householders are busy.  When they shop they think of it not as an experience for the most part, but a task to get over and done with.

“We shop by routine and rote,” she says.  “We buy the same things all the time.  It’s not necessarily brand-loyalty, but habit.  Something is familiar and we buy it yet again.  Not necessarily because we like it, but because it’s familiar.  What we want to do with Brambles is let the buying public know there is a wide world of options.  We want people to know they can buy items with healthful ingredients.  In terms of BC produced and packaged items we have stringent standards in the province and we don’t permit genetically modified items.  For products from elsewhere, such standards aren’t as stringent.”

Brambles’ produce all comes from organic growers, and local growers as much as possible in season.  Meanwhile, none of their meat has been adulterated with steroids or antibiotics.

Another area of motivation, adds James, is respect for local farmers and producers.  He is quick to assert that the agricultural community of the Comox Valley—one that is much more extensive than many residents realize—is a significant part of his heritage.

“My grandmother was a Piercy and they were among the pioneering farmers of the Comox Valley,” he says.  “I want the Comox Valley to respect and preserve what we have here, and one way we can do this is to buy their products.

“The Valley holds huge potential agricultural capacity,” James adds.  “The mainstream population of the Valley doesn’t know what we have here.  For example, we’ll go to a supermarket to buy peppers.  The peppers could have originated anywhere.  But, do people know we have a major pepper producer in the Comox Valley?  And those peppers are often cheaper than the ones from elsewhere, and much better.”

As they have to compete with the big chain stores, and that can be a daunting objective, it is essential that Brambles offers alternatives in order to retain and also expand its customer base.  James believes that their meat offerings cannot help but entice those who are seeking unadulterated quality.  Their sausages, for example, contain no binders or fillers.  That puts them well ahead of most commercial sausage brands which can actually contain such fillers as silicone dioxide—or sand, in other words.  Likewise many commercial chickens are injected with water, and the law permits up to 30 per cent water. Brambles’ chickens are 100 per cent actual chicken.

“Quite frankly our meat and poultry products are excellent,” James says.  “All the beef or pork comes from one animal that has been slaughtered locally, and we have a huge advantage of having an abattoir in the Comox Valley with Gunter’s.  What we have is delicious and unadulterated.”

In one respect what Angeline and James are offering at Brambles is nothing new.  This was the way marketing was carried out by everybody a few decades ago before chain stores established themselves and offered the conveniences they do.  At the same time, what Brambles is offering isn’t retro either.  That’s because all that is available must meet the scrupulous standards of the proprietors, as well as meeting stringent provincial codes. That wasn’t always the case in grandma’s day, not to mention the fact that marketing regulations were virtually nonexistent in days of yore.

So, what is this customer base that is seeking ground beef with which you can actually barbecue a hamburger and know the meat was just ground that day, on site, and finds its source in a single side of beef from a steer raised in the Comox Valley rather than perhaps multiple heads of cattle, slaughtered elsewhere with how long ago being anyone’s guess?

“Our beliefs go back long before the current ‘foodie’ trendiness,” Angeline says.  “What we are doing with the store is exactly the model we’ve had in mind for years.  Agreed there is a certain battle to sell a concept like this because most of society doesn’t buy in for reasons stated earlier.  At the same time, we have a definite customer base.”

While you might think that the bulk of Brambles’ trade would originate locally—and they assuredly have an ever-growing Comox Valley customer base—Angeline has also found it interesting how much the store appeals to newcomers, and especially those from larger centres like Vancouver and Calgary.

“They really buy into what we’re doing here,” she says.  “They want a certain standard of quality and service and that’s what we give them.  We actually had a call from some people from out of town wanting to buy a house here but also wanting to know what we had to offer in terms of what they had gotten used to in the city.”

That the Streets convey a combination of gratitude and support for their community goes without saying.  In the same context they are strong advocates for other localized businesses and believe that the public should give them all the support they can for fear of otherwise losing them.

In that sentiment they cite the case of the speculation around a large international chain restaurant considering setting up shop in the Comox Valley.

“The possibility made the front page of local newspapers and that’s really disheartening,” Angeline says.  “There’s a trickle-down effect with such places and people don’t seem to realize what happens to locally owned and operated restaurants when yet another big chain outlet comes to the community.”

Another service offered by Brambles lies in the realm of research of products, since, as Angeline explains, “We don’t always carry the full line of any particular product, but if you want to know anything about a particular product or whether other products are available from the company, we can call up the distributors and get you the information.”

She notes that to qualify as a BC product, the item must be at very least packaged in this province.  As there is no olive crop grown here, when you buy olive oil you are obviously getting something that originated elsewhere.  But, the olive oil can be bottled here—and some labels are—and hence becomes a BC product.

At the end of the day, what it comes down to is education, the Streets say.  It’s a matter of learning to appreciate what we’re eating both nutritionally and taste-wise.  “Eating for good taste and good nutrition has a lot of potential once you get into the swing of it,” Angeline says.  “Get into the habit of buying good food and preparing good and nutritious meals, and they can be done simply and quickly, you’ll never look back.

“And, with children, start them young,” she adds.   “If kids have a role in buying food they love being a part of it.”