Food Co-ops: More Than Another Grocery Store
Food cooperatives have the potential to bring affordable, quality produce to historically underserved neighborhoods by flipping the script on how grocery stores traditionally operate. Across the country, neighborhoods with plenty of grocery stores are still burdened by poor health due to a lack of affordable options. These same neighborhoods often lack enough jobs for their residents, compounding the problem further. Food cooperatives are designed from the ground up to be engines of community sustainability and are well suited to address these complex problems.
Unlike a typical grocery store, food cooperatives are run directly by their employees and members, who typically pay a small membership fee to join. This ensures a level of social responsibility that normal grocery stores simply aren’t incentivized to have. The plans for the coop detailed in this article stress the opportunity this provides to create jobs in the community and to take advantage of healthy, sustainable, hyper-local produce suppliers. As food coops like this one in Detroit expand, they can offer a wider array of produce and increase capacity to serve other purposes such as food pantries or community event spaces. And, perhaps most importantly, cooperatives are, by their nature, more likely to keep the money from their revenue in the community where they operate.
Brian Allnutt Feed Brian Allnutt. (2019, January 31). A Black-Led Food Co-op Grows in Detroit. Retrieved September 30, 2019, from https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/01/black-owned-food-coop-detroit-dbcfsn-d-town-farm-yakini/580819/.
