Last-minute intervention needed to save Long Beach low-waste market

Low waste, high impact — we make ethical shopping easy.

Katy Impellizzeri still believes in the mission. In an economic milieu that prioritizes big profit over little things like environmental sustainability and fair labor practices, Impellizzeri thinks there’s a place for an indie business that “make[s] ethical shopping simple and accessible,” one where you can buy “100% vegan, cruelty-free, and low waste essentials that are ethically produced to prioritize people, fairness, and transparency,” where “every product aligns with our values of equity and sustainability.”

That, in a nutshell, is Ethikli Sustainable Market, which in February 2022 began providing conscientious consumers in Long Beach with an easy opportunity to reduce their [full disclosure: our — I’m a proud and loyal customer] waste footprint while steering dollars away from corporate greed and toward businesses with conscience. Beans and legumes, herbs and spices, coffee and tea, cereal and granola, pasta and noodles, nuts and seeds, bread and chocolate, baking products, personal care items, cleaning and laundry supplies — there are few essentials you can’t find here, and at surprisingly affordable prices.

But barring an 11th-hour financial windfall, Ethikli will cease operations at the end of October.

The reasons are manifold, says Impellizzeri, Ethikli’s founder and majority owner. A perception that downtown Long Beach is unsafe. Increased operational costs. Decreased foot traffic. Insufficient marketing. Tariffs. Rising costs of living without a corresponding bump in wages. 

“I’ve been paying out of my own pocket just trying to keep this place open,” she says, “and my savings is gone. […] But I still really believe in the mission, and I’m holding out hope. That’s part of the reason why I’m giving it until October, even though I really can’t afford it. I at least want to give it one last shot.”

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Despite growing up in the restaurant industry, Impellizzeri did not envision a career having anything to do with comestibles “because I know all the headaches that come along with food.” 

Having her own business, however, seemed a natural fit. Shortly out of high school she founded a pet-sitting company, which became so successful — over 100 clients and a few employees — that she was able to buy a house in her native Virginia with the proceeds from its sale. She sold the house to finance a move to Santa Monica in 2013, where she worked full-time as a yoga teacher. 

During the next several years Impellizzeri began to home in on the idea for what would eventually be Ethikli. 

“I’ve been super passionate about living a low-waste lifestyle for a long time,” she says. “Even as far back as high school I was conscious of it and then started getting really serious around the time I moved. It’s always been a dream of mine to do something in this realm. I don’t know that groceries specifically was my dream, but making a difference in something related to the environment was something I had dreamed of for a long time. And helping to change the food system.”

Over the course of numerous visits to Long Beach (where her best friend resided), Impellizzeri came not only to love the city but to feel it might be the place where that dream could become reality.

“I met a lot of like-minded, down-to-earth people who supported my cause,” she says. “I was shocked there wasn’t already a refill grocery store in LB. […] I needed a place like this, and I saw that the Long Beach community needed a place to get groceries without creating a lot of waste and supporting a broken system.”

She moved to Long Beach in 2020 and started doing no-waste pop-ups around town, the success of which made her believe that a brick-and-mortar store might work. She signed a lease on her East Village Arts District storefront in August 2021, although “we didn’t officially open until February [2022], because it took a really long time to cut through red tape with the City, get permits. That was a big hurdle to overcome right at the beginning.”

But once Ethikli opened its doors, the initial response was overwhelming.

“I’ll never forget our first week open,” she recalls. “My friend was helping me out, and at the end of the day we looked at each other and said, ‘Is this how it’s going to be?!’ It was amazing, the turnout and the passion that people had.”

After the first year, business slowed (“perhaps excitement over the zero-waste food movement died down a little bit”), which made the City’s “high permitting and licensing fees that [much more] unaffordable for a small business.” 

Meanwhile, Impellizzeri was running herself ragged, not only with the store but also vending at various farmers’ markets to support Ethikli and help spread the word. 

“I was literally doing everything, wearing all the hats all the time, and I just couldn’t maintain that, so I had to hire some help,” she says. “That made [the financial bottom line] a little more challenging.”

Some of the best months came after Impellizzeri restructured Ethikli from operating as a sole proprietorship to a worker-owned LLC. But then came a series of setbacks, made all the more unwieldy when she unexpectedly got pregnant and moved back to Virginia to be closer to family. These included “a bit of drama between some of the worker-owners, [so] we had to get rid of the folks that were creating the drama.” 

Around the same time, Ethikli went from being allotted a weekly space at the Marina Farmer’s Market to every other week, “and that was one of our big moneymakers, so that hit us really hard at an already difficult time” — difficult because foot-traffic declined, partly due to a widespread perception that downtown has become increasingly unsafe. And because some of Ethikli’s suppliers are located in Canada, Donald Trump’s tariffs have recently hit home.

But perhaps more than anything, Impellizzeri laments her inability to market Ethikli sufficiently.

“That’s also what’s really killed us: so many people don’t know we exist,” she says. “We just haven’t had the funds for marketing. […] I’ve gotten feedback [from people] that it looks so beautiful inside that they just assumed it was super expensive. […] We probably haven’t priced things as high as we could have or perhaps should have, but it’s always been important to me to make things as accessible as possible while checking all those [ethical] boxes, [including] paying people fair wages all along the supply chain, which inevitably makes the [end] cost higher. […] So I think it’s a lack of marketing, the inability to educate folks on the fact that we’re not more expensive. But after doing the bookkeeping and scheduling and ordering and product resourcing, […] I simply didn’t have any time left to make a bunch of Instagram reels to tell people about that. I think that was our biggest weakness, for sure. And we’ve gotten so close to being profitable, so close, quite a few times. We were on the way, but there’s always something that comes up, throws a hiccup in the plan; and not having a safety net of capital to quickly recover from those hurdles…. There were many, many issues stacked against us, and it’s incredible that we made it even this far.”

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Although at present Ethikli is slated to close October 31, Impellizzeri hopes against hope for another outcome.

“If somebody wants to take over and buy us out and continue the mission, that’s great — we’re accepting offers. Or if someone wants to step in and save us by investing, that would be even better, because I would love to continue. […] Basically, we need $150,000 to keep going for things to stay exactly as they are [operationally]. That would allow us to really do some marketing. But all that’s negotiable, depending on how much [potential investors] want to be involved.”

But even if this is the end, she doesn’t want you to think that the moral of Ethikli’s story is that alternatives to the status quo are impossible.

“I want people to know that even if we close, it’s not a failure,” she says. “Ethikli would be successful had we the necessary funding. I don’t want people to get discouraged […] and say, ‘No ethical business is possible, so we might as well just give up and let Amazon take over the world.’ I want it to stay a positive thing, because we did do a lot of amazing things. We did keep hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the pockets of billionaires who are destroying the world.”

Ethikli Sustainable Market is located — at least until October 31 — at 352 E. 4th Street, Long Beach. Phone: (562) 614-3647. For partnership/ownership inquiries, call or e-mail katy@ethikli.com. Those who’d like to help on a smaller scale can donate via GoFundMe — and/or shop, of course.