Refill ‘Er Up

Dispensing Differently

Some of Alaska’s zero-waste retailers use a self-serve model by which customers weigh, fill, and label the container of their choice. Stores that take this approach acknowledge that educating customers about this process takes more time.

“Not everyone is familiar with how to shop bulk,” says Michelle Young, co-founder of Raw Market in Girdwood. “The refill shopping experience can be overwhelming, and many people miss or misinterpret the instructions.”

Those instructions include signs reminding customers to wash and dry their hands at sinks that Raw Market provides in the shop. Some shops get around that issue by having employees handle all weighing, filling, and labeling.

At Sunshine Health Foods in Fairbanks, manager Katie Johnson says the company buys more than 350 bulk herbs to package in-house, where they’re sold in one-ounce or one-pound quantities. “We choose to bag the herbs ourselves,” she says, enabling the shop to “process the herbs or bulk grocery items that need to be broken down with minimal waste, loss, or cross-contamination.”

Summit Spice and Tea Company in Anchorage handles packaging with two employee-staffed counters, says owner DeeAnn Apgar. Customers can get as much or little as they want—and in their own containers, as long as they’re clean.

Sticky and Tricky

Dry goods are so easy to sell in bulk, compared to the added step of pre-packaging, that they were practically made for refilleries. “These items have long shelf lives, are easy to portion, and are stored well in reusable containers,” says Young. Raw Market must take more care, however, with moisture-sensitive items, such as dried fruits or oily nuts.

Brown sugar proved so tricky for Blue Market AK that the Anchorage shop had to stop selling it in bulk. Founder and co-owner Jen Gordon says the store sells thousands of items, but the blend of white sugar and molasses tends to dry out quickly. So far, it’s one of very few cases where Blue Market AK has not figured out a good way to mitigate issues for bulk dispensing.

With liquid items, refilleries have more varied experiences. At Sunshine Health Foods, Johnson says liquids are the only bulk items that they let customers self-dispense. At the soap station, customers can refill several cleaning liquids into their own containers. “This has proven to be successful with little to no mess—an easy refill process and happy customers who not only save money but also reduce packaging,” she says.

Others find liquids more challenging. “There’s a lot more clean-up and maintenance involved,” says David Ottoson, general manager of Rainbow Foods in Juneau. That store used to have a peanut butter machine, but “it was a pain to clean, so we haven’t offered that for a long time.”

Blue Market AK has also had “issues with breaking or leakage” of the equipment used to dispense liquids, Gordon says. Molasses created particular challenges, as it gets thick and sticky. Like brown sugar, Blue Market AK had to stop selling molasses in bulk for now.

Cleaning also creates issues on the container side of things. Plagerman says his dairy can’t easily reuse milk jars that don’t come back sufficiently clean. Most customers do very well at rinsing out residue, he says, but some return the bottles “gross, dirty.” Sometimes he’s seen the odd jar from an out-of-state dairy like Straus Family Creamery in California. And if there’s old milk in the jar, Plagerman says, “We basically have to throw ‘em away.”

Jared Solberg, general manager of Natural Pantry in Anchorage, says stinky milk jars can become an issue for retailers too. Because of the deposit process, the store must ask people to bring the jars back clean. But even jars with a slight residue can start to stink. Depending on how long until the next milk delivery, he says the store’s kitchen sometimes washes milk jars before returning them to the dairy. Solberg understands; he admits that he also sometimes forgets milk jars in the garage before cleaning.

Milk sold in glass tastes better, in Plagerman’s opinion, but he says the dairy had to completely stop selling chocolate milk that way because the sugar content kept the jars from getting clean enough. “We’re very strictly monitored on these glass bottles by DEC,” he says, referring to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

Reusing Containers

In theory, bulk bins reduce the need for packaging, but many customers forget to bring reusable bags for a shopping trip, never mind jars—and clean ones at that. Stores take several different approaches to this challenge.

Some stores accept jar and bottle donations, which customers can use for free. Depending on the store, they may also supplement this with new jars for purchase. Ottoson says Rainbow Foods doesn’t sell jars, but the store puts out clean jars that would’ve otherwise been recycled after the first use. Summit Spice and Tea sells many prepackaged teas and cocoas in tins with removable labels so customers can easily reuse the container for future purchases.

Upstream from retailers, relatively few suppliers have a setup like Plagerman’s, where the dairy encourages customers to return and reuse packaging. Of those that do, some charge a deposit while others maintain a more informal system.

With the dairy, individual retailers collect the deposit as part of the bottle sale, refunding it when customers return jars to the store. Alaska Range Dairy, in turn, charges retailers a deposit for every jar sold. Plagerman says the dairy credits retailers each delivery, calculating the deposit based on the number of jars returned.

Raw Market sells cold-pressed juices in reusable bottles, with a deposit charged upon purchase. Customers receive a $2 credit toward future juice purchases for each jar returned. Young estimates that about 30 percent of Raw Market’s jars get returned.

Alaska doesn’t have a statewide container deposit system, of course, so businesses manage their own. “I like it,” Plagerman says of using jars in the dairy. “I wish it worked a little better.” However, he adds that most large retailers don’t want to hassle with the bottle collection, despite the rarity of old-fashioned “cream-top milk” like his.

Alpenglow Skin Care founder and owner Susan Houlihan says a lack of containers has not been a problem. “I’m kind of like the bucket source for my friends,” she says. Houlihan gets many supplies for her manufacturing—like glycerin or rose hip oil—in five-gallon buckets. Between wholesale customers like Blue Market AK and direct sales within her home base of Homer, she’s able to reuse many containers.

Despite its Anchorage location, Blue Market AK staff usually pick up new Alpenglow Skin Care orders in person during other trips in the Homer area, Houlihan says. They’ve worked out a system to return empty containers at the same time. Other customers might return several containers at a time. Some Lower 48 customers even mail them back in a batch.

Cream and Coffee

Each time Houlihan prepares a new batch of, say, face cream—she usually makes 25 to 50 gallons at a time—she contacts retailers first. When they tell her how much more they want, she packages the new product in reusable buckets.

Some customers —like Blue Market AK—return the buckets already clean. But Houlihan cleans them again, just to be safe. “I’m very particular with cleaning things. I’m the manufacturer,” she says. Once dry, she sterilizes the buckets and stacks them in a storage area. Before filling the buckets, she sterilizes them a second time.

Gordon says Alpenglow Skin Care is one of multiple producers Blue Market AK works with that reuse or reduce containers in the distribution process. Another, Uncle Leroy’s Coffee of Anchorage, has a bucket exchange program. Co-owner Austin Schwartz says three other wholesale customers participate in the coffee bucket exchange in addition to Blue Market AK.

Like Houlihan’s system at Alpenglow Skin Care, participating customers let Uncle Leroy’s know how much coffee they want. Staff then fill the buckets, which hold up to 12 pounds, accordingly. Each time they make a delivery, they collect the empty buckets for cleaning and reuse.

Schwartz says the roaster has had the exchange program since Uncle Leroy’s started wholesaling coffee several years ago. When it was selling coffee in a retail space, customers could take the empty burlap bags that unroasted coffee (called “green beans”) had come in. They now donate them to the Muldoon Chanshtnu Food Forest for use in the community gardens.

Because its bulkiest raw material comes in bags, Uncle Leroy’s had to buy buckets to use in the roastery, Schwartz says, but they can reuse those for a long time. “In the long run, in theory it would be cost effective because you’re [otherwise] purchasing those five-pound bags” to package coffee for wholesale clients, he says.

At Sustainable Wares in Homer, owner Karen West saves as much as she can from incoming packages and uses it for all her mail-order customers. West says she never runs out of shipping supplies, but storing the empty boxes does take considerably more space. “I have piles of boxes and packing material.”

Yes, she could flatten the boxes, but West says that would take too much time. Thus, whenever she gets overrun with cardboard, West unloads the surplus through various Facebook groups.

Many of her incoming packages use greener materials like paper. When packages arrive with bubble wrap or air-filled plastic pouches, she saves those for certain customers. When people order items already involving some plastic, West says she feels comfortable reusing plastic in those orders. However, if customers buy only plastic-free items, she sticks with the most sustainable packaging she has on hand, reusing paper or peanuts made from cornstarch for those orders. Sustainable Wares sells many plastic-free items, including beeswax food wraps, Alpenglow’s peony soap, and wallets made from repurposed tires. Whatever the packaging, every outgoing shipment includes a sticker saying “everything is reused and usually able to be recycled.”

How Reusables Do or Don’t Pay Off

For Sustainable Wares, reusing packaging has almost surely saved money on shipping supplies. West figures, “I don’t really purchase packing material.” Other businesses find more mixed results.

Plagerman says milk bottled in glass accounted for 13 percent of gallons sold in June 2025. (The dairy uses half-gallon jars instead of gallon plastic containers, but it measures total sales volume in gallons.) Cleaning and shipping glass jars is more expensive, he adds, and fewer bottles fit on a pallet, despite the smaller volume.

Natural Pantry once offered one of the largest bulk sections in Anchorage but no longer sells even coffee in bulk. Solberg says the store hopes to bring bulk bins back within the year, depending on the outcome of conversations with the Anchorage Health Department. The COVID-19 pandemic imposed changes to Natural Pantry’s bulk sales. “The bulk bins went away and they really haven’t come back yet,” Solberg says.

Once Natural Pantry stopped letting people self-fill from its bulk bins, management calculated the most common quantities of each bulk item sold and started prepackaging items accordingly. The store briefly experimented with selling spices prepackaged in small amounts, but it has mostly offered one-pound bags and more traditionally sized jars.

The adjustment has been difficult for some shoppers. “We’ve had customers tell us, ‘You don’t do bulk anymore, we’re never gonna shop here again,’” Solberg says. However, he says the store is actually selling more pounds of product now that it’s all prepackaged.

Bulk bins were also a source of inventory shrinkage. Solberg observes that sales of items like regular bulk almonds regularly exceeded what was stocked on the sales floor. He figures some customers bagged organic almonds and then wrote down the price look-up code for cheaper regular almonds.

Summit Spice and Tea avoids shrinkage problems by not allowing self-serve bulk purchases. At each of two counters (one for teas, one for spices), an employee handles all weighing, filling, and labeling.

Selling in bulk allows for better pricing, Apgar adds, while letting customers buy just what they need. “It just seems like it makes a lot of sense,” she says. Depending on the purpose or item, people don’t always need a lot of certain spices, especially more costly ones. And bulk sales mean people can try a new tea without making a big commitment.

Houlihan cites a similar benefit with her skincare products. “I always encourage people, ‘Try the product in small sizes’” to see if they like it, she says. After all, bulk sales don’t just have the potential to reduce packaging waste; they can also reduce waste of food and other products. In the long run, some customers may find the greatest savings there.