Sullivan’s Foods

Regular grocery store with all the grocery necessities. I went for a birthday cake hoping they had some with whipped topping, only a few to choose from. A very nice selection for a great price though. I saw they had a deli full of different types of salads and foods that you can take by the pound and what not. Other than that it was a pretty small store. They had a little discount section that I thought was cute because of the variety of merchandise they had there. Employees were super nice & quick to help me. Everything you need in a grocery store so it was half bad.

After leaving Clive, I heard the news that I just missed massive showers and flooding in La Vista and Council Bluffs — if I had left a day later — I would be looking for another route! I stopped in Princeton IL for gas and wanting to avoid another bad pizza, thought I would stop in the grocery store I passed to see if I could come up with some healthy local produce for lunch later.
I was shocked: not only was most of the stuff in the store packaged, including the fresh produce, there was not a single item in the produce section (that I could see) that was local. Seriously?
We’re in Illinois in AUGUST and you can’t tell me that they aren’t growing fresh, delicious tomatoes somewhere around there — right? Most of the produce was from Chile (isn’t it WINTER there?), Mexico and California. You couldn’t just buy a handful of greenbeans — they were swathed in shrink wrap on a styrofoam tray.
The kids at the cash register told me that Sullivan’s is the last grocery store in town — the others have all folded due to competition from Wal-​Mart for grocery dollars.
There is a farmer’s market, but they weren’t sure when it was or where it was — but they were pretty sure that there was something. Little did I realize that this was just the tip of the iceberg of my grocery store/​local produce experiences on this trip.