Zero-Waste Store Expands To Downtown Dartmouth
DARTMOUTH — A Halifax entrepreneur is bringing her zero-waste shopping option across the harbour with a new storefront in downtown Dartmouth.
Kate Pepler is the owner and CEO of The Tare Shop, the first package-free bulk store in Nova Scotia.
The Tare Shop is a bulk store that sells not just traditional foods like nuts, pastas, and dried beans. It also stocks products that are tougher to buy waste-free, like cleaners, shampoos, and peanut butter.
Shoppers also bring their own containers to carry out their products, meaning no plastic bags are used.
“The whole mission or purpose around the business is to educate and inspire folks to live with less waste in their lives,” Pepler told Huddle on January 7, one day before she threw the doors open at her Dartmouth expansion.
Pepler first opened The Tare Shop in Halifax in 2018. A few years earlier the Toronto native had finished an environmental sciences degree at Dalhousie, and she was thinking a lot about sustainability.
“I spent five years learning about all of the harm humans are causing to the oceans and to the environment and was pretty depressed,” she recalls. “And so after graduating I was trying to think about what I could do to make a difference.”
After learning about the zero-waste movement she tried to adopt the lifestyle herself, only buying food that didn’t come pre-packaged. But in Halifax, it was a tough pursuit.
“I was spending a lot of time driving around to a bunch of different places trying to find things package-free. So if I wanted take out I would … go to a restaurant and order and just dump the Pad Thai into a container. Or I would go to Superstore and put their bulk items in my own cloth bags without asking,” she says.
Eventually, she realized other people must want to live waste-free as well and were probably having just as much trouble as her. She asked herself why she couldn’t be the one to change that and eventually decided to open The Tare Shop.
“I flip-flopped back and forth for a while [thinking] who am I to do this? I didn’t go to business school, I’ve never taken a business class, who am I to start a business? But eventually flipped that and asked: why not me?”
Pepler had some experience managing a team but little starting her own business from scratch. But she got to work, took a few courses, and over the course of about eight months put together a business plan.
She says the response to the first Tare Shop in Halifax was great from the beginning but that her goal was always to grow beyond the one location
“From the get-go of planning this, I knew I probably wanted to have more than one location. And Dartmouth was always the logical next step in my mind,” she says.
So when a prime space on Portland Street opened up she made the leap, despite the fact that the province was still in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Pepler says “there’s been a lot of hiccups” preparing to open during a pandemic (a worldwide glass shortage means she’s without hundreds of containers she needs to display products) and more than a little second-guessing.
“I would ask myself, why am I opening up another business in the middle of the pandemic?” she says. “But this location, this space, was just too perfect to pass up.”
She says she’s also seen steady traffic at her Halifax store throughout the year and that many of her customers are grateful for a zero-waste shopping option at a time when shopping in bulk is particularly difficult.
“I think it is important that just because we’re dealing with a global pandemic, it doesn’t mean the climate crisis or plastic problem went away,” Pepler says.
Like the Halifax location, The Tare Shop in Dartmouth is in a “food desert” that hasn’t traditionally had a lot of grocery options that were both nearby and accessible.
She says she’s excited to be able to provide people with a place to buy groceries, lower their waste, and do it in a way that’s more accessible.
“I think people are still so grateful to be able to shop with lower waste and I wanted to keep that going [with the Dartmouth store],” she says. “And so being able to continue to grow and expand and make it more accessible to more and more folks is important.”
Trevor Nichols is a staff writer with Huddle in Halifax. Send him an e-mail with your story suggestions: [email protected].