About the Healthy Buyer's Club
 
Do you know where your food is coming from?

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!

Brian Shilhavy

Founder
Tropical Traditions, Inc.

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