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Starting a food co-op: Year 1

quaran.to

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Re: Starting a food co-op: Year 1

#41

Post by mym1990 »

AaronM wrote: post #4
neilv wrote: post #2

This seems to be in the Boston, Mass., area. Some related local background is that there was the Harvest Co-op chain until a few years ago: https://www.boston.com/food/food/2018/10/04/harvest-co-op-ma... There's also the Market Basket for-profit regional chain, where employees and customers successfully stood up against some family business maneuvers to force out the head, and it's once again generally well-regarded…

Vermont has a fairly successful Co-op in Burlington. https://www.citymarket.coop/

I kind of love the old styler website and the .coop domain to booot!

Re: Starting a food co-op: Year 1

#42

Post by carride »

neilv wrote: post #2

This seems to be in the Boston, Mass., area. Some related local background is that there was the Harvest Co-op chain until a few years ago: https://www.boston.com/food/food/2018/10/04/harvest-co-op-ma... There's also the Market Basket for-profit regional chain, where employees and customers successfully stood up against some family business maneuvers to force out the head, and it's once again generally well-regarded…

Here are more details are the year before harvest shutdown. Summarized to say that all the unique organic and varieties of healthy food they were once known for, can now be found at most other grocery stores. https://archive.ph/NEc4o

Re: Starting a food co-op: Year 1

#43

Post by sct202 »

ricardobeat wrote: post #35

Can anyone shed more light on why it takes 7-10 years to get to an actual store? In my head you’d start signing up suppliers / farmers, find a suitable place to rent, get some more funding, build out the store, hire, and start it up. What makes it slower than other businesses?

There's a long capital raising period where the co-op will need to raise a substantial amount of capital in the form or preferred shares and owner loans. The co op near me says they need a certain percentage of capital to come from owners in order to secure commercial loans, and they've recently completed raising capital after signing up owners for the last 9 years.

Re: Starting a food co-op: Year 1

#44

Post by wpietri »

I love the playbook mentioned here. I think it's part of this library: https://fci.coop/business-development/

Seems reminiscent to me of the open-source ethos or the (declining?) community spirit in tech startup land. Except where organizations compete directly, collaboration makes a lot of sense.

Re: Starting a food co-op: Year 1

#45

Post by Kalium »

ricardobeat wrote: post #35

Can anyone shed more light on why it takes 7-10 years to get to an actual store? In my head you’d start signing up suppliers / farmers, find a suitable place to rent, get some more funding, build out the store, hire, and start it up. What makes it slower than other businesses?

Coops often find it harder to borrow and they cannot sell equity. This makes the every "get some funding" step harder than it sounds. Going over the list I see a lot of people-organizing and community-outreach efforts. These are definitely going to be more time-intensive than setting up an LLC owned by a single person and running with that.

Re: Starting a food co-op: Year 1

#47

Post by micromacrofoot »

debacle wrote: post #11

There is a local group trying to "disrupt" coops in this way: find members to shell out $$, have a steering committee, do a lot of marketing, all before the coop even has a location in mind. Meanwhile there are actual coops (though they don't call themselves that) with skyrocketing membership who are doing, not planning, and slowly growing to encompass more than just produce. One of them now has a year-round greenhou…

They're just two different ways of approaching risk. The so-called "doers" are taking on much more up-front risk than this type of grassroots attempt. Ultimately the goal is the same.

Re: Starting a food co-op: Year 1

#48

Post by qrush »

Semaphor wrote: post #46

I wish I could follow this, but the blog sadly lacks any (discoverable) RSS feeds. So qrush, any chance of that changing?

Good question. I moved away from Jekyll/GitHub Pages a while back and onto Notion/Super.so. A good feature request, but I'll just post again here next year :)

Re: Starting a food co-op: Year 1

#49

Post by kthartic »

Semaphor wrote: post #46

I wish I could follow this, but the blog sadly lacks any (discoverable) RSS feeds. So qrush, any chance of that changing?

Not to be rude, but I don't think I've seen the term "RSS" in over ten years. I'm sure there's probably a niche group of people that still use them (maybe disproportionally higher amongst HN users), but I think OP can be forgiven for not including one.

Re: Starting a food co-op: Year 1

#50

Post by nelsondev »

debacle wrote: post #11

There is a local group trying to "disrupt" coops in this way: find members to shell out $$, have a steering committee, do a lot of marketing, all before the coop even has a location in mind. Meanwhile there are actual coops (though they don't call themselves that) with skyrocketing membership who are doing, not planning, and slowly growing to encompass more than just produce. One of them now has a year-round greenhou…

With the loss of the community grocery store, it seems the author is working on replacing the “community”, and not yet the “grocery store”.

I too am wondering if there is a way to make incremental progress on getting groceries here, without needing to get enough momentum to build a giant store.

Maybe there are 10 most common fruits/vegetables, and the coop with the existing 400 members can bulk purchase those? CSA models ostensibly seem a viable alternative.

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