Green Thumb Fruit Market

Cashier gossiping about customers walking by outside attending to dogs in Cantonese. Don’t forget that people inside the store can hear you and may also be dog owners. Won’t repeat what was said but you are in a public place and should mind your mouth.
Disgusted. Won’t be shopping here again. Plenty of other grocers with better manners and service nearby.

Terrible place to shop. Cashiers are rude and try to take advantage of elderly customers, or customers in a rush by ringing things up very quickly and either charging extra or wrong amounts. You need to watch them like a hawk. Produce quality is also hit and miss, and they are very unfriendly if you try to make an exchange. With so much competition on Bloor St West, I would strongly recommend going elsewhere.

disgusting.
I have to hold my breath to even pass by – shopping there is outright unpleasant. They let their compost liquids dribble out over Bloor St and their empty boxes fill up the sidewalk.
Whenever I do buy groceries there more than half of it spoils within the next few days.
The prices are generally less expensive than nearby grocers, but not by much, and I find I have to spend more anyway since I need to go out and replace my spoilt groceries.

I hesitated to do this, because I really liked this place, but I’ve decided it’s the right thing to do, for the betterment of Unilocaldom.
Green Thumb has gone downhill.
There, I’ve said it. It has. The prices are rising, the selection is shrinking, and they’ve taken to bulk-​packaging things as they age for quick sale. Take lemons, for example. There’s one price if you select your own, one by one, but if you’ll take a pre-​shrink-​wrapped styrofoam flat of six, they’re cheaper. Only problem: they’re also about to go bad. Squeeze them. They’re squishy. Same goes for the no-​label bagged salad greens, which seem to have been culled from the brand-​name plastic boxes of salad greens when part of the latter went bad. Take them home, and a day later you have wilted greens.
So, take-​home point? Beware the low-​priced no-​label pre-​bagged/​packaged items here. As far as I can tell, they’re done to move aging produce.
I’m a loyal shopper, generally, so it makes me sad to change teams. But lately I’ve been heading over to Young and Sons instead.

Along with Carload and John’s Fruit Village on Armadale, Green Thumb rounds out the triple threat of produce markets in Bloor West Village. You can comparison shop between the three of them, and I highly recommend it for these three hot ticket items:
* cherries
* avocados
* ataulfo mangoes
They usually vary in price a little but Green Thumb’s got the market cornered when it comes to reasonably affordable green and red grapes by the pound (think hard, juicy and seedless**). Nowhere else in the city will you find better quality grapes, and I have tried hard to find a replacement in the east end without any luck. Asparagus is also sold here at rock bottom prices, and they often have 4 – 6 kiwi for $ 1 —
says kiwis are an excellent source of fibre (4g per!), vitamin C & B6 (grumps and curmudgeons are in desperate need of this last one).
** can someone please phase out seeded grapes? Thanks.

They usually have some very good buys here and this is my personal favourite of the many fruit stands on the Bloor West strip. But since there are about five or six within a few blocks, you can easily walk from one to another to compare. These folks do carry more organic stuff than the others, and I notice that some of their root vegetables are covered with dirt — a good sign to me, as it indicates minimal «processing.»