The Healthy Buyer's Club is a service provided by
Tropical Traditions, Inc., and 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.
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 raised on grass and sunshine and the food they produce. We
also believe in sustainable agriculture and protecting our natural resources.
And because 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. 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 some organic standards 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 Coconut Oil in the
Philippines (see:
Virgin Coconut Oil), and we are working on several other products both here in the US
and outside the US that we plan to introduce to you soon.
One of those is our Pastured Poultry chickens raised on Cocofeed. When we began
looking for a good source of chicken raised on pasture, we found that all the
organic chickens available 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. The trial batches raised in 2005 went
very well, and laboratory tests showed lauric acid present in the chickens. In
May 2006 we introduced these chickens to our customers. We know of no other
chicken like this currently in the U.S.
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 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 will 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!
