This Garden City grocery store eschewed plastic. Now it’s closing
A one-of-a-kind grocery store in Garden City is closing.
Roots Zero Waste Market announced on social media that it will shutter for good on Dec. 16. The grocery store and cafe, located at 3308 W. Chinden Blvd., offers a radically different experience from a conventional supermarket.
Packaging at the store is minimal. Paper covers some bars of soap and toilet paper, and cleaning products come in glass spray jars. Fruits and vegetables from local suppliers are packed loosely in display bins. There are no plastic bags or even rubber bands to keep carrots and scallions in bunches.
But co-owner Lea Rainey said the market just didn’t have the foot traffic to make it work.
“We provided an example of what things could look like if we wasted less and created less pollution,” Rainey told the Idaho Statesman on Friday. “In that way, it’s been really successful. But financially, we’ve just never had the volume that we needed to continue.”
Rainey and her husband, Zach Yunker, opened Roots in 2019. She said he has a secondary job that supports them because she doesn’t take a salary from Roots.
“Everything that we have, we put back into the business,” Rainey said.
To this day, she says the market remains the only zero-waste grocery store in the country, though there are around 1,300 zero-waste refill stores, which receive most of their goods in large cardboard boxes lined with paper or plastic bags.
Zero-waste markets started popping up in Europe over a decade ago as a way to eliminate packaging waste.
“I hope that the corporate model changes,” Rainey said by phone. “I truly believe that it needs to, and I think that there’s a possibility for it to. I think that companies just need more of us to be doing it for it to become mainstream.”
Rainey isn’t despairing. She hopes customers see the news as a call to action to waste less and support more local businesses so they might not meet the same fate.
In the meantime, the store, whose closing was reported earlier by BoiseDev, needs to clear its shelves of dried goods and households items. Roots still plans to stock fresh produce and deli foods through Monday, Dec. 15.
“Come eat, drink, share some hugs and appreciate what we’ve built, together,” Rainey wrote in an Instagram post. “We hope to see you in the market.”
Rainey told the Statesman that she doesn’t know where she’ll buy her own groceries after Roots shutters.
“I don’t have good alternatives for people, unfortunately,” Rainey said. “I couldn’t, you know, send them to one store versus another, because there is still a lot of plastic packaging, and there is still a lot of greenwashing that is in the conventional grocery store experience.”
This story was originally published December 7, 2025 at 4:00 AM.
