Why I Only Shop the Edges of the Supermarket

I'll push the trolley through the front doors, hang a right, and start working my way around the walls. Fruit and veg first. Then the meat fridge. Bread. Dairy and eggs. By the time I've done a full lap of the outside, the trolley's basically full and I've barely touched the middle of the shop.

It took me a while to realise this wasn't a quirk. It's where all the actual food lives.

The good stuff is around the outside

Think about what sits around the perimeter of your supermarket. It's the things that go off. Fruit that bruises. Veg that wilts. Meat and dairy with a use-by date measured in days, not years. Bread that's stale by the weekend if you don't get through it.

That's not a flaw. That's the whole point. Real food is alive in a way that packet food isn't. It ripens, it turns, it has a clock on it. You can look at any of it and name every single part, because it only has one part. An apple is an apple. Eggs are eggs.

The middle is mostly real estate

Here's the thing that gets me every time. The centre aisles take up the most floor space in the entire shop. Row after row of shelving, stacked to the ceiling, stretching further than anything around the walls.

And yet, arguably, that's where the least actual food is.

It's packets. Boxes. Things engineered to sit on a shelf for a year or two and look exactly the same on day one and day five hundred. The biggest chunk of the shop is given over to products designed to last, not products designed to feed you. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

What "lasts forever" actually costs

For something to survive that long, it has to be built to. And that building shows up in the ingredients list.

Preservatives to stop it going off. Refined sugar and seed oils because they're cheap and shelf-stable. Emulsifiers and stabilisers to hold it all together. And that beautiful bit of label language, "natural flavour", which can mean almost anything the manufacturer wants it to.

I'm not here to tell you it's poison. I'm just saying there's a difference between food and something that's been designed to look and last like food. The perimeter is honest about what it is. A lot of the middle isn't.

I'm not precious about it

Before anyone rolls their eyes, no, I don't live in a monastery. I still walk into the middle. Olive oil lives in there. So do tinned tomatoes, dried lentils, oats, a jar of good mustard, the tea and coffee (would never forget the coffee). Plenty of real food hides in the centre and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

The point isn't a rule I never break. It's a default. Start around the edges, fill the trolley with the things that actually go off, and then dip into the middle for the handful of bits you genuinely need. You'd be surprised how little that turns out to be.

This is basically why I do what I do

I've spent years making treats, and this is the exact tension I've been chewing on the whole time. Most treats live firmly in the middle aisle. Long ingredient lists, things you can't picture, built to last on a shelf.

I wanted to make the opposite. Something that tastes like it belongs in the middle, but reads like it belongs around the edges. Real ingredients, nuts, cacao, dates, the good stuff. Handmade in Sydney since 2012. No shortcuts, and nothing in there you couldn't name.

So next time you're doing the shop, try a lap of the outside first. See how much of your trolley you can fill before you ever turn down an aisle. It's a good little reset, and it might change what "food" means to you too.