The rice is usually in 10 and 25 pound cloth bags that zip and have a plastic liner. They're also stitched closed below the zip so you have to pull the string to get into the bag once you have it home. The rice comes from India, Pakistan, and various other nations and principalities in the region.

The Asian market also has large bags of rice, and while there is *mostly* Basmati at the Halal market, they have a few others such as the fragrant jasmine rice and some yellow rice. I buy a brown Basmati rice to get a bit more fiber from it. The Asian varieties are short, long, round, fragrant, all sorts of types and colors. They have the jasmine rice, pearl type rounder grains, long grains, grains meant for sticky rice, etc. What we see on the shelves in American mainstream grocery stores are maybe three varieties from a crop that has hundreds of varieties from around the world.