Local Love: Your Source of Seasonal Local Produce
Matt Golinski discovers a place where locals can go to worship at the temple of local, seasonal and fresh food.
They say you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat others. In the same way, I believe you can tell a lot about a supermarket by the way it treats its cheese. And in the case of the new Seasons IGA in Noosa Junction, they’ve built the cheese equivalent of the Taj Mahal.
Cheese lovers beware, once you enter the temple, you will most likely leave with far more fromage than any human should keep in their fridge at one time.
Seriously though, this is a truly dazzling display of local, Australian and international cheeses that you would be unlikely to see together even in some of the best cheese shops in the world.
Woombye and Kenilworth, two of our finest local cheesemakers, feature prominently alongside fresh buffalo mozzarella and bocconcini, and a huge variety of fetta and curd cheeses.
Whole wheels of Roquefort, Bleu D’Auvergne, and Stilton; real, proper Reggiano Parmigiano; Pont L’Eveque, Brie de Nangis, and Brie de Meaux, oh, Brie de Meaux!, all sit proudly behind tall glass doors like big, creamy, gooey apostles.
Shopping in a supermarket can tend to be a sterile and sometimes soulless experience, with consumers funnelled towards the brands with the most corporate clout. Small local producers, if they do manage to get their products on the shelves, are screwed down in price so much it’s not worth being there. And for the people at head office, profit margins are all that matters.
But the IGA model is a very different one.
Actual people, not shareholders, independently own these supermarkets, and those owners have the power to choose how they want to run their stores.
More often than not, they are families who are part of the community, so they are happy to support their community, whether that’s by donating to local school groups, or by stocking a new product from an up and coming entrepreneur. In this case, Greg Weiss and Dustin Pereira recently took over the IGA in Noosa Junction and their commitment to sourcing locally grown and produced products wherever they can is evident. There’s a big difference when the owners are proud to be local, live local and support local.
Providing a great shopping experience for their customers is a priority, and that comes in the form of a fresh produce section with plenty of interesting and unusual fruit and vegetables, a special dry aging cabinet for meats, different proteins such as kangaroo, buffalo and goat, and an extensive range of gluten free, dairy free and vegan products.
Happy, friendly, knowledgeable staff round out the experience, making you feel as though nothing is too much trouble.
Don’t miss the fill-your-own kombucha on tap; crush-your-own peanut butter; and squeeze-your-own orange juice options.
Being the one tasked with doing the food shopping can seem like a drag at times, but when a business like Seasons IGA in Noosa Junction creates something more than shelves and fridges, with the right products and the right people, it very quickly turns going out to get the groceries from a burden into an adventure. A somewhat spiritual one if, like the IN Noosa team, cheese is your god!
Seasons IGA | Sunshine Beach Road, Noosa Junction | Phone 5447 2777
