About Exist Green
Omaha’s refill market for Grocery, Herbals + Essentials.
Exist Green is Omaha’s refill market for Grocery, Herbals + Essentials, housed in a solar-powered 1907 home in the Dundee neighborhood. Pantry staples, loose-leaf tea, apothecary-style herbs, home refills, local produce, and practical plastic-free goods all live under one roof.
Everything is built around a simple idea: you should be able to buy only what you need, in quantities that make sense, without the usual packaging waste.
Why this store exists
Most shopping is built around products that move easily through modern supply chains, whether or not their packaging, ingredients, or full footprint make much sense. Exist Green was built as a practical alternative, where people can buy only what they need and bring home goods screened more carefully for both people and planet.
The store is organized around Grocery, Herbals + Essentials: pantry staples and seasonal produce, loose-leaf tea and apothecary-style herbs in bulk, and practical home and body goods that carry lower-waste choices into the rest of daily life.
Beyond refill
Refill is one visible part of the model, but not the whole of it. The work also goes further upstream, through housemade production, reusable farm bins, bulk formats, and select closed-loop supplier systems that reduce packaging before it ever reaches the shelf.
The shop also offers free compost drop-off for customers through a partnership with Hillside Solutions, closing the loop on food scraps and compostable end-of-life products.
A more careful screen
Packaging is only part of the story. Exist Green follows the precautionary principle in what it stocks, asking harder questions about ingredients, materials, and upstream impacts before products reach the shelf.
We favor simpler, more thoughtfully made goods built around plant botanicals, minerals, and lower-waste systems from the start.
About the Founder
From remediation work to retail, the shift was less a departure than a move upstream.
Before opening Exist Green, Leigh spent more than a decade in environmental engineering, focused on contaminated soil and groundwater, and continues to hold a Professional Engineer (PE) license in Civil Engineering. She holds a BS in Environmental Engineering from Colorado State University and an MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UC Berkeley.
That work raised a harder question, not only how to clean up damage after the fact, but how to move earlier in the chain, before so much waste, exposure, and unnecessary material became normal in the first place.
The gluten-free grocery focus is personal too. Over the years, Leigh’s gluten intolerance grew more pronounced, and avoiding it made something obvious quickly: wheat is in almost every menu, staple meal, and convenience option. Exist Green’s shelves lean into gluten-free flours, pastas, grains, snacks, and meal-building staples that still bring comfort, texture, and a satisfying carbohydrate element to the plate.
Running the store is upstream work too: every product on the shelf has already passed through the same questions about ingredients, packaging, and footprint before a customer sees it.
Our team
The people who run Exist Green arrive from different backgrounds: studying sustainability in university, practicing conservation in the forest, organizing in the community. What they share is a conviction that how we shop should reflect how we want the world to work.
Partnerships + affiliations
Exist Green is a proud member of Plastic Pollution Coalition and an affiliate of Beyond Plastics, two organizations working to end plastic pollution through upstream solutions, policy, and community action.
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