Celebrating 23 years of serving the Malibu community, Pacific Coast (PC) Greens hosted its annual “Taste of PC Greens” food fair last Saturday, Nov. 7. Dozens of white tents in the parking lot housed natural gourmet food product vendors, along with petting zoos, raffles and music.
“The community has supported us, and we want to give back something,” PC Greens natural gourmet grocery store owner Michael Osterman said. “We’ve remained true to our mission statement since we opened. Nothing in the store has additives — pesticides, chemicals or artificial colors. You don’t have to read any label in here — you can pick up any product and be sure it’s 100 percent clean and safe.”
The offerings and free samples during Saturday’s fair covered just about every food category, from meats, snacks and condiments to bottled water, food supplements, beverages and salads. Most of the vendors are “mom-and-pop” food companies that make products in small batches or have small, specialized farms. All of the vendors represented products that are already carried by PC Greens.
“It gives our customers a chance to try new things,” Osterman said.
PC Greens customers seek specialty products that are some combination of non-GMO, sugar-free, soy-free, gluten-free and dairy-free. Meats are hormone-free, chickens and eggs are cage-free, and beef is grass-fed. Foods are locally sourced whenever possible.
Brands sold at PC Greens are not national, including names like Just Jams, Lulu’s Salsa, Matt’s Munchies, You Are Loved, Nuda Salads, Castle Rock, Bee Panacea, Smart Chicken and Chica’s Corn Chips.
Kaliko Orian of Kaliko Farms supplies PC Greens with multi-colored chicken eggs from free-range chickens that are corn-, soy- and GMO-free and hosted a petting zoo at the “Taste of PC Greens.” She expressed her happiness with the work that Osterman does.
“He’s a huge supporter of small local farmers, and his integrity and ethics are everything. He helped us out by holding shelf space in the store, helping purchase egg cartons and even buying some of our chicken coops,” she said.
PC Greens’ longest-term employee, Candy Clausen — the store’s vitamin buyer and manager — feels the store’s customer base has broadened over the years.
“We have customers coming from Brentwood and Beverly Hills just to shop here, and I see a lot of travelers and out-of-towners,” she said. Clausen also noted “customers are more particular than they used to be, and they want to know everything about a product.”
In reflecting on his time in the business, Osterman said, “20 years ago, this kind of food wasn’t popular, it was hippy-ish. Today, it’s mainstream. There’s been an evolution in the way people want and need to eat.”
According to Osterman, PC Greens offers a selection of over 19,000 products. He explained that he generally doesn’t have to go out looking for locally sourced products because “the local producers come to us, or we see them at the farmers markets. We even have people in Malibu with 20 avocado trees or 20 persimmon trees that we buy from.”
Some of the food vendors are hometown entrepreneurs from Malibu. Robert Jaye, founder of Malibu Olive Co., was at the fair Saturday representing his line of organic “super-premium” olive oils, made from olives grown in Malibu.
Another olive oil vendor from Malibu, Laura Silveira, imports an award-winning line of “high quality extra virgin olive oil,” Colinas de Garzon, from her native country Uruguay.
Primal Kitchen of Malibu, headed by Mark Sisson — a former elite endurance athlete with a series of best-selling health and fitness books — sells jars of mayonnaise made with avocado oil instead of canola oil, cage-free eggs and organic vinegar, among other natural ingredients. The avocado mayo has a slightly green tint.
“We’ve changed the whole concept of mayo,” Sisson said. “There’s no need to use this sparingly, and it’s shelf-stable for one year.”
Despite the recent defeat of Measure W, which would have paved the way for a potential competitor, Whole Foods, to be built less than two miles away from PC Greens in the Malibu Civic Center area, the topic was not particularly top-of-mind. When asked, Clausen said she was “ecstatic” that the measure did not pass. Her view is that Whole Foods is a large national chain that’s “not as personal” as PC Greens.
