How to go zero waste grocery shopping

My family goes to the grocery store about every other day, sometimes everyday! It may seem like a lot but we like to make a lot of new recipes and we don't have like 3 ingredients so we run to the store. A big problem is getting it environmentally friendly! What if we just went to the grocery store once a week?! Getting fruit in chain grocery stores hasn't been a problem so far. Except for mushrooms. They always come in this packaging:

Although the bottom part is recyclable. I can't recycle it where I live. And the saran wrap can be reused if you take it off super carefully. But what if we could get these naked? What if grocery stores carried 3 types of mushrooms loosely and you could bring your bag and pickup how much you needed! That's what I did at the grocery store the other day!

If you zoom in the back to the right, there are beautiful unpacked mushrooms! When we went to our local Publix's they were packaged in all the plastic and I'm sorry but I can't give them up. Sauteed up with some onions, wow, they're amazing! My mom and I went to a strawberry fest and we were going back home to have a BBQ. I need a yellow squash to BBQ and my mom looked up a produce place. Not only is it better for the environment because it's grown locally and it hasn't been shipped from Mexico or Michigan (nothing bad about those places, it just makes big CO2 emissions) it's usually unpackaged or you can ask them to reuse the packaging! We went to the Produce Place and found so many amazing things. All you have to do is Google "Produce places near me". This place is about 30 minutes away from where we live so we will be going once a week (although most of the things we want to do are 20-30 minutes away).

We walked into a tent and saw so many vegetables piled up in perfect little mountains. I saw some massive avocados that were cracked and grabbed one (people are less likely to grab imperfect ones and they go to waste! I saw the pile of yellow squash and got one. Over in the corner I saw some more brown fruit in plastic bags. I immediately went over and there were about 6 bags full of different vegetables that were really ripe. The bags had squash, cabbage, lettuce, lemons, peppers, cucumbers and some other stuff. We picked a bag that had good things to grill and also grabbed a coconut that was 99 cents! Then we walked through the rest of the tent with our jaws on the floor. They had exotic fruits unpacked, they even had big dill pickles unpackaged! At the counter they had portabella, button, shiitake and oyster mushrooms all loose! They were packing them in compostable boxes to buy but we asked to get some in our bag and they were more happy to put a pound in for us. And then we purchased everything. The total came out to this:

$4.28! 99 cents for the whole bag of vegetables, they charged us 15 cents for the coconut, they discounted the massive avocado because it had a crack to 15 cents and the pound of mushrooms were $2.99. How crazy is that. We walked back to our car and on the way I saw that they had sugar cane. We already had so much stuff so I told my mom we would get it next time. A guy who worked there gave us 2 sugar canes and said "these are on the house". We will definitely come back here the next time we need any vegetables! If your local store could be doing a better job ask to talk to the manager to see what they are doing. If they aren't really doing anything you can go to farmers markets, church sales or produce stops on the road!