At a time when so many independent food sellers have been taken over by large corporations, Sally Bromley continues to stand strong as the owner and manager of Leura Health Foods.
One of the original hipsters, Bromley established her health food shop long before Kombucha became available at your local festival or gluten free bread and soy milk could be requested at any suburban café.
With a vast array of both vegetarian and vegan food and household products available, Leura Health Foods provides everything you need to maintain a healthy vegetarian or vegan lifestyle.
Bromley also enables her customers to expand their knowledge of sustainable living practices by having naturopathic advisers available in store, as well as in the clinic downstairs.
As an enthusiastic member of Low Carbon Living, Bromley undertook our energy, waste and water carbon audit in 2017 and since then, has acted on a number of our recommendations to help lower her carbon footprint.
These changes have reduced annual carbon usage by 44.44% reduction, or 6.2tCO2-e.
Changes include replacing all but three of her fluorescent lights with LEDs and replacing one fridge with a more energy efficient model. Bromley also introduced a shop policy to minimise the use of standby energy and the upstairs taps have been improved with water efficient fittings. Bromley doesn’t use air conditioning at all and only uses heating in the shop on very cold days, instead she prefers to just put on a jumper and keep moving and talking with customers.
Bromley has also taken the step of installing solar panels that are highly efficient and provide 20% of the shop’s energy needs. Insulating the back door and the shop’s hot water piping are also planned as future energy efficiency measures.
In addition to this, after learning that the company had achieved the highest ‘green electricity’ rating by the Total Environment Centre and Greenpeace for three years in a row and that it invests only in renewable energy, Bromley has also chosen Powershop as her new electricity supplier.
In other measures, Bromley has diverted an impressive 90% of Leura Health Foods waste from going to landfill by fermenting and drying foods, as well as reusing, reducing, recycling and composting.
With Easter coming up, Bromley is concerned about the high use of aluminium packaging that occurs at when consumers buy Easter eggs. To address this, she has been promoting alternate ways of celebrating the holiday by supplying sugar, chocolate and dairy free options - all without the wrapping.
Bromley also encourages eating raw food, sprouting pulses and fermenting as great ways to reduce your food preparation time and energy use, as well as your household budget, and use of food waste and packaging.
Bromley is an enthusiastic LCL-BM member. One of her core business principals has always been to use less or no energy. Beyond the basic comforts, she can't understand why you would use more of anything than you really need.
We wholeheartedly agree.