The Healthy Buyer's Club is a service provided by
Tropical Traditions, Inc. The Healthy
Buyer's Club website provides online retail purchasing for all
Tropical Traditions,
Grass-Fed Traditions, and
Household Traditions products.
A paid membership is NOT required to purchase these retail products. A paid membership in the Healthy Buyer's Club provides one with access to bulk discount prices on
the Tropical Traditions,
Grass-Fed Traditions, and
Household Traditions line of retail products, as well as other organic and
natural products available only in bulk sizes. Tropical Traditions was the first
company to bring
Organic Virgin Coconut Oil to the U.S. market
from the Philippines, and now offers a full line of quality organic products.
Grass-Fed Traditions offers 100% grass-fed meat and dairy products.
Household Traditions offers
nontoxic household products and health appliances. You can see the full
catalog of products here. All of our products
are GMO free!



How Did the Healthy Buyer's Club Start?
The Healthy Buyer's Club was started by Brian Shilhavy, the founder of Tropical
Traditions:
When my family was forced to leave the Philippines, we had
to adapt our eating and lifestyle from living in a rural agricultural area of
the Philippines, where we had access to a local public market and fresh farm
goods produced in our community and the areas surrounding it, to buying food on
the shelves of stores where we had little or no knowledge of those who produced
the food. As we settled back into life in the United States, I sought out
healthy food sources that I felt we could trust to meet the nutritional and
health needs of our family.
Finding good food sources and healthy products is an
ongoing endeavor, and the products represented here are the products I have
trusted to meet the needs of my own family. I won't sell you products that I
won't use personally or give to my children. With meats and dairy products also, it is not enough to simply be "organic." We
believe that animals raised on pasture produce much more nutritious food that
animals in feed lots eating organic grains and organic soy, and so we give
preference to
animals humanely raised on grass and sunshine. We
also believe in sustainable agriculture and protecting our natural resources.
Since high quality products cost more, the Healthy Buyer's Club was
established to provide an opportunity for families and others to purchase these
products in bulk quantities at a discount price, and have them delivered to your
door.
How are Products Chosen for the Healthy Buyer's Club?
We have a strong commitment to
family farming and organic standards. We stand firmly against genetically
modified foods (No
GMOs!). But the organic label is not enough for us. We research and
find out where the products are produced, and how they are produced. We find
that some organic standards are too loose for our trust, so we look beyond what is
claimed on a label. We find out as much as possible about those who provide the
products. And if a certain quality of product does not exist, we will work with
others to produce that product and offer it to our consumers. We did that with
Virgin Coconut Oil in the Philippines, and we have done the same thing since
coming back to live here in the US with our
soy-free
eggs and
poultry.
Our
Pastured Poultry chickens
are raised on Cocofeed.
When we began looking for a good source of chicken
raised on pasture, we found that all the organic
chickens available to us, even those raised on pasture, were fed a high
concentration of soybeans, and this concerned us. So
after two years of research, we finally came up with
an organic feed that was soy-free and utilized the
coconut pulp that was left over after the coconut
oil was extracted from it. In May 2006 we introduced
these chickens to our customers, and the
following year we also raised
turkeys on this feed which are now also
available.
Then in 2008 we were asked to provide some of our Cocofeed
to a study being done at Ohio State University as it was the only soy-free
chicken feed available to be used in a study that showed soy protein was passed
into the yolks of eggs from chickens fed high concentrations of soy. We found
out that egg-laying chickens fed our Cocofeed had the soy protein in their egg
yolks disappear within 10 days of being on our feed. So we worked with farmers
in Wisconsin to raise egg-laying chickens on our Cocofeed, and in 2010 we began
offering
soy-free organic eggs to our consumers as well.
We want you to feel safe when
shopping in our online store, so we have a
commitment to you to not sell anything that is
harmful to the best of our knowledge. All of our
foods are either certified organic or meet quality
standards that are equal to or higher than organic
certification. This includes no GMOs. This is quite different from most
health food stores, where you have to be "on your
guard" as most of them offer conventional products
right alongside organic products, because they want
to offer a full selection of products to compete
with regular grocery stores. We would rather offer
fewer products, and stick to our high standards, so
that you can feel safe when shopping here.
Fats and Oils
We believe strongly that there is much confusion in the area of fats and oils in
the US today. We believe that there is too much soy in the American diet (soy
was not a major component of our diet prior to World War II), so we do our best
to make sure that soy is not an ingredient in any of the products that we sell.
We also believe that there are too many polyunsaturated refined oils in the
American diet, and as a result an overabundance of the Omega 6 fatty acids in
our food today. We believe the traditional fats and oils that have been consumed
in traditional cultures for hundreds if not thousands of years are still the
healthiest fats and oils available to us today, including
coconut oil,
olive oil,
palm oil,
sesame
oil, and
butter from the milk of pastured animals.
What's Ahead?
The Healthy Buyer's Club is still in its infancy, and many more products will be
added as we move forward, and find people producing products that meet our high
standards. We are already working with farmers to be able to drop ship products
directly to your home from the farm. In time, we hope to also setup regional
centers where you can pick up local food produced close to your
community. So join us today and help restore responsible, healthy food
production in the US and around the world, and have that food delivered to your
door. The larger we grow as an online community, the more opportunities we will
have to obtain healthy products and positively change our society!