How Did Pharmaca Start?

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to my article series.

*insert catchy theme song*

If you missed my last post about the dangers of 5G and wireless technologies, click here.

All caught up? Woo hoo. Onwards.

My book, It’s Easy Being Green: How Conscious Consumers and Ecopreneurs Can Save the World, is officially out. I can’t believe it! If you haven’t had a chance to order, no worries, it’s on Amazon. You can buy the paperback or the e-book. The e-book is only 99 cents this month.

Much of my book features stories of founders and CEOs who started environmentally-focused and health-centered companies. Having the opportunity to interview Barry Perzow, the founder of Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, was an absolute thrill for me. I’ve been a fan of Pharmaca for years, so hearing his story inspired me and made me appreciate the brand even more.

So, without further ado, here’s an excerpt from my chapter about Pharmaca. I hope you enjoy.

**

Meet Barry Perzow, founder of Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, which he started nearly twenty years ago. Pharmaca, with thirty-four stores across America, is dramatically different than the average pharmacy. Yes, customers can fill their prescriptions there, but that is where the similarities end between Pharmaca and conventional drugstores. Pharmaca is staffed by healthcare professionals, such as estheticians, nutritionists, herbalists, and naturopaths, so customers have help making healthy and educated decisions.

All the products at Pharmaca are selected carefully with the health of the customer and the planet in mind. Shop at a Pharmaca, and you’ll come across organic and vegan snacks, cruelty-free and chemical-free cosmetics, vitamins, and natural cleaning products. Pharmaca also offers supportive therapies. For example, if a customer needs to be on a certain pharmaceutical that might deplete a vitamin in the body, a Pharmaca representative can recommend something to offset an adverse reaction.

Barry was living an organic lifestyle before it was cool and mainstream. He started Pharmaca after spending years in the natural food industry. From 1993 to 1997, he was the president of Capers Natural Community Markets, which became the largest natural grocery chain in Canada. In 1995, Capers merged with Colorado-based food company, Alfalfa’s, and the following year, merged with another food company, Wild Oats. By then, Capers Alfalfa’s was 124-stores strong. The company was then sold to Whole Foods.

Barry’s natural food stores had broken the conventional grocery-store model. He then decided to do the same thing for pharmacies. He saw that conventional pharmacies had room for improvement, telling me in an interview that visiting them “felt like shopping in a microwave oven. It just didn’t feel good.”

Barry and his wife traveled through Europe for six months, looking for a new pharmacy model. He tells me:

I wanted to be influenced more by homeopathy and naturopathic products and less by medicated prescriptions. The average American is a quick-fix consumer who has grown into a position of saying, “If I have something wrong with me, give me the fastest thing, I don’t care what it does to my body or what it does to my system, just make it go away.”

He and his wife visited between 400 and 500 European pharmacies, met with the owners, and fell in love with the European pharmacy model. He admired that pharmacists in Europe preferred natural remedies, like homeopathy, to drugs. He says of the European model, “In very dire circumstances, under a doctor’s advice, they will dispense a drug, but that’s the last resort. In our country, that’s the first resort.”

He also paid particular attention to how European pharmacies were staffed with medical professionals who were actual experts in their fields, unlike American conventional pharmacies, where pharmacists were the only experts on the premises. He says:

I started hiring only homeopathic doctors, naturopathic doctors, clinical nutritionists, wellness consultants, and estheticians. I was more interested in having an esthetician who was also a nutritionist — which we wound up finding — who would say to a customer, instead of pushing some cosmetic onto them, “Before I recommend this particular skin product, I recommend taking fish oil every day for six months, and let’s get some moisture into your skin, and then I’ll recommend a product.”

Barry wanted the customers to feel like the staff member cared about their needs, rather than just pushing sales.

When I ask Barry about how he staffed the first store in Boulder, Colorado, he tells me that he put a whole page advertisement in the local newspaper, The Boulder Camera, stating that he was holding a job fair for homeopaths, naturopaths, estheticians, and those trained in Ayurvedic medicine. He did not know if he would find the people he needed. He says:

I pull into the parking lot in my car, and I see almost fifteen people waiting in line in front of the tent, and I say to myself, “Wow, I didn’t think this was going to happen!” I start interviewing people, and I hired the first ten. And those ten people are still with us today. They were fantastic.

**

Thanks for reading. If you want to connect, you can email me at aviva.peltin@gmail.com or contact me on Instagram.