Start Your Own Food
Co-op or Buying Club
Ever notice how the cost of food continues to ‘creep’ up every month? Frankly, I don’t know how large families manage their food bill any more. Starting your own victory garden will certainly help the food budget; even condo and apartment dwellers can grow a small amount of vegetables to help reduce food costs.
There are many online resources one can make use of for details on starting a co-op. It all starts with a group of like-minded individuals and families who desire cheaper, healthier food.
Start a Buying Club
WHAT IS A BUYING CLUB?
A buying club is a group of people who volunteer their time and energy to purchase high quality, healthful foods at affordable wholesale prices. Members equally share the work among themselves thereby trading their time for lower prices. Buying club members enjoy the community aspect of working together and often learn new skills.
HOW DO COOPERATIVE BUYING CLUBS OPERATE?
There are five basic steps in processing an order:
1. Members use the Blooming Prairie Price Guide and monthly Prairie News to make up their individual orders, which are then compiled into a group order. Usually they pre-pay their bills, so that the club has the money to pay the Blooming Prairie truck driver at the time of delivery.
2. This group order is sent by modem, called in, mailed or faxed to the warehouse.
3. Members meet a Blooming Prairie truck at a designated delivery site, with at least three people available to unload and check in the club's order.
4. Members divide up the order into individual household orders.
5. Individual bills are re-computed after the delivery. Credit or debit adjustments are made as needed, and members take their groceries home.
HOW DO I START A COOPERATIVE BUYING CLUB?
We recommend you have seven to ten households to start a club. This allows for the sharing of responsibilities among members. It's a good idea for at least one of you to have some organizing experience, such as with another buying club. If no one in your group has experience, you may want to join another buying club in your area, at least temporarily. Call Blooming Prairie for club contacts closest to your area. Talk up the idea with family, friends neighbors, and co-workers. Share copies of our current price guide and monthly sales flyer; it will give prospective members a clear idea of what is available to them and at what prices
Hold a meeting! Invite all of those people who are interested in the buying club idea. This gathering is an opportunity to emphasize the cooperative nature of a buying club how members share the work fairly, trading their time for high quality organic and natural foods at wholesale prices. Keep in mind it's important to get everyone involved in the club from the beginning. This way potential members expect to participate.
This is a good time to set up an organizational committee. Areas this committee will want to cover include: overall coordination, price guide and sales flyer distribution, ordering and collating, delivery location, break-down, supplies and equipment, bookkeeping, new member orientation and cleanup. As time goes by the committee will need to adjust some as the club grows and changes.
Discuss details such as the proposed delivery site and what supplies and equipment you'll need for the break-down. Decide on membership requirements.
When locating a breakdown site, consider practical details Possible delivery and distribution sites are churches, town halls, public buildings, fire houses or county fairgrounds. Site needs include accessibility for tractor trailer trucks enough space for the order to be sorted out, and flexible hours of availability. Remember, Blooming Prairie will not deliver on gravel or unpaved roads. Optional, but nice to have, is a sink for washing and clean up, a refrigerator, a freezer, and a phone.
Before ending the meeting, choose a name and a backup name for the club. (We may need to use the backup name if the first choice is a duplicate of an existing club.) Fill out the member application along with a map to the delivery site and mail it to Blooming Prairie. We need this prior to placing your first order. You will receive a confirmation call providing the club contact with the order deadline, delivery date and a short orientation. See the following link for even more information on co-ops and clubs.
http://www.coopdirectory.org/bp003.htm
Basics of Starting a Food Co-op
One way to provide the very highest quality of food for yourself and your family is to find other families in your area and band together to form a buying club," say Sonya and Ed Kugler of Natural Needs, a Chicago consulting firm that does events and outreach for the organic products industry. The Kuglers once ran a food cooperative in their garage. A food co-op or buying club is member-owned and member-controlled, and operates on the share principle: that a group, buying in bulk directly from distributors, can obtain the best food choices at a better-than-average price. "There are warehouse distributors all over the nation that are set up to provide you with the goods and services you need," the Kuglers say. Some co-ops continuously occupy a permanent site, like a storefront or a member's garage; others temporarily use a site, such as a church basement, for a few hours a week while members divvy up a delivery of food.
Terry Shistar, Ph.D., a board member of the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides (NCAMP) and a long-time organic food co-op member, writes in the winter 1995-96 issue of Pesticides and You that most co-ops are based on the following six points:
1. Open membership
2. Democratic control
3. Return of surplus to members
4. Limited rate of return on investment (co-ops exist to provide services for members, not to invest capital)
5. Belief in education
6. Cooperation among co-ops
The beauty of the co-op, or buying club, form is its loose cut. It can be tailored to fit the size, character, needs and capabilities of any group. "The average co-op has around 12 to 20 members," the Kuglers estimate. Many co-ops start out in members' homes and garages, move into small storefronts, where members work a certain number of hours to be able to buy food at member prices, and grow into actual grocery stores. The Hanover Consumer Cooperative food stores in Hanover and Lebanon, New Hampshire, have 20,000 members. "Since all 144 people who work at the [Hanover] store are, like the rest of us, co-op members, and hence part-owners, there is a camaraderie while shopping that is akin to that found in an old-time general store," observed Noel Perrin in the New York Times Magazine.
In some co-ops, a member can buy at a discount without having to buy in bulk. Often, member discounts vary according to how much labor, if any, a member contributes per month. "The point is, there are as many ways to run a co-op as there are co-ops," the Kuglers say.
Keeping your Co-op Running
(We've condensed these ideas from the Kuglers and Shistar's article.)
1) Membership and Sharing the Work. In addition to sharing food, "For the new food-buying club, it is best for everyone to share the work," Shistar advises. Make sure your co-op has enough people to divide up tasks and meet your distributors' minimum order amounts. This doesn't mean everyone schleps heavy boxes; members should volunteer according to their capacities and skills. Here are some jobs:
Treasurer: Keeps the checkbook, balances books.
Order Coordinator: Can be done by an individual or committee. Terry Shistar works this job for her co-op. "I receive the orders from members two weeks before delivery date. I collate them and send them to Blooming Prairie [the distributor] a week before delivery, and download and print invoices on the day of delivery. I can do all this because Blooming Prairie supplied us (for a small fee) with a computer program that does most of the work." In other co-ops, order collating is done by a committee that takes the orders of, say, 30 families by hand, writing each item on an index card. Then the committee chair serves as liaison with the distributor.
Telephone Contact: The one whom the distributor calls before delivery day to give the arrival time of the truck, and who then notifies the other members.
Delivery Day Crew: Meets the truck and divides up the orders. To divide cheese, flour, dried beans and other bulk items, the co-op will need a scale, bags or wrap, and markers for labeling.
2) Delivery and Division Sites. A co-op needs a designated place at which to meet the truck and divide the order. Ideally, this would be a place with refrigerators, sinks, shelves and tables. Church basements make good sites, in exchange for donations of surplus to the needy.
3) A Distributor. You may want to work with more than one. Bulk items might be bought from a major distributor and specialty items from an organic coffee company. Both can be located through national co-op organizations (see below). Fresh produce might be contracted for in a Community Supported Agriculture group (CSA, see The Green Guide #40) with a local farm.
4) An Equity Account. To build up a common fund that will cover rent and other expenses, such as photocopying and bank fees, co-ops can charge members up to 5% an order for the first year or two. The surcharge should be offset by members' savings through buying in volume.
--Adapted from The Green Food Shopper (by Mothers & Others, 1997, 175 pages), a hands-on manual that tells how and where to get organic and local food, how to start CSAs and farmers' markets, and provides all the tools M&O's Shoppers' Campaign uses for convincing merchants to stock better food choices. With 18 pages of resource addresses and phone numbers.
http://www.cgin.coop/how_to_start