From Urbana to Wisconsin and Home Again

I love all seven of the cooperative principles that definethe way co-ops do business, but there is a special place in my heart for #6,cooperation among cooperatives.  Most cooperatives officially interpret this principle to mean, “cooperatives serve their members most effectively and strengthen the cooperative movement by working together through local, national, regional and international
structures.”  This refers to organizations like the National Cooperative Grocer Association and Cooperative Grocer Information Network through which bring co-ops together formally to share information, collectively buy, and more (more on them in my next blog post.)

 While this is an excellent part of cooperation and is a good definition of the #6 principle, it leaves out a vital part – the informal cooperation that goes on constantly between cooperatives. A good example is the trip I and deli manager Ameila Bolt, produce assistant manager Anne Bargar, grocery assistant manager Joni Wong, and front end manager Rachel Hess took to Wisconsin this past Wednesday and Thursday to get a look at three terrific sister food co-ops and to train at one of them.

For some reason, I thought going to Wisconsin in the middle of winter was a good idea. My reasoning was that the co-op is pretty quiet in January and could probably spare a few of its managers for part of a week and that Wisconsin was the place to go because it was the nearest place where there was several food co-ops close together for us to visit. When we planned the trip, snow had not happened yet so I was a bit blindly optimistic about weather conditions for this trip.

Luckily, my optimism panned out for the beginning of our outing and we arrived at our first destination, Outpost Natural Foods in
Milwaukee, at 8 am Wednesday morning.  Outpost is a huge co-op boasting three different stores within Milwaukee and the Milwaukee suburbs.  Starting as a tiny group in 1970, they have
grown far beyond their humble origins to a cooperative business with over $20
million in sales a year.  We spent our morning at their smallest store, their Bay View location with a retail sales area of 7500 square feet (to put that in perspective, Common Ground’s retail sales area is 2150 square feet). 

Outpost’s Bay View store has a warmth that bellies its size. It was designed in 2005 by a local designer and co-op owner who specializes in green design, and it is beautiful.  Beyond its simple physical beauty, though, is how the Outpost team has developed ways to engage the owners throughout the store with recipe cards featuring local and in-season ingredients,  an upcoming classes info board, posters of what is considered local and regional, and more. All these signs and sources of information help broadcast Outpost’s values through the store.

The Outpost crew was amazing! Their general manager, Pam Mehert, gathered together a team of nine of her staff members to meet with us. They met with us oneon one all morning after a collective meet and greet and all of us came away with many new tools, spreadsheets, ideas, and a ton of enthusiasm.  Here are just a few of the things we gleaned:

• Anne came away with ideas on how to reduce waste in produce, improve the quality of merchandise we are receiving from distributors, and better ways to use our equipment to prevent products from going bad.
• Rachel got fabulous input on how to talk about ownership with new co-op supporters,how to streamline and improve the training of new cashiers, and more.
• Joni walked away with many forms to help organize the grocery department’s record keeping as well as ideas for new bulk items, and better ways to label product shelves with information like farm locations, gluten-free, and more.
• Amelia found out about how deli’s offer items like specialty cheeses and olives at Outpost and how she might offer similar products at Common Ground, got ideas and recipes for new products, and ideas on how to streamline production.
• I learned new ways to measure store performance like tracking how many times our inventory turns over per year, better ways to present fiscal reports to the co-op staff so they are easier to use, and new ways to budget for effective staff training.

Something else you quickly notice when touring Outpost is the co-op’s dedication to giving back to the greater community. Their outreach coordinator was quick to point out all the collection cans for donations to a different charity every month and their collection area for food and winter clothes for Milwaukee-ites in need. Every fall when their owners vote for their board of directors, they also vote on what twelve charities their co-op will support, one each month, over the next year. We loved the idea, and want your feedback on whether to adopt it this fall at Common Ground.

 It was hard to leave Outpost, we had so much fun with their team and we felt there was probably far more we could have learned there. But . . . it was time to caravan on to Madison where we would visit one of the largest and most iconic food co-op’s of the Midwest,Willy St. Co-op.

Willy St. is has over 10,000 square feet of retail space and does over $20 million in sales a year, more than 10 times that of Common Ground. Madison’s population is almost exactly twice that of Champaign-Urbana combined, yet they have over 16,000 owners – more than six times the number of owners of Common Ground. Their history, like ours, is rooted in the1970s movement for both economic social justice and organic food. What they are perhaps most famous for is their culture, the way that, despite three different expansions over the last 35 years, they have kept that community vibe alive and well. We were eager to pick their brains not only for ideas for running a great store but for their secrets for keeping owners engaged.

Store manager Dan Frost answered our question about how they maintain their fabulous community feel with two simple things:

• An annual t-shirt contest for owners to design
  the annual co-op t-shirt that is voted on by the owners and
• Throwing one great annual party for co-op owners
  every year with lots of live music and food.

Really? That was it? Dan laughed and said, no, there is far more to it, but his point was that these things are what their co-op was most famous for – the things that make ownership fun. He reminded us, while undertaking the serious work of changing our broken food system and running a grocery store every day, not to forget the importance of making it enjoyable for everyone – the owners, the farmers, the staff, and the shoppers. Values are at the center of any strong community, but it is enjoying ourselves together that can knit us together and really makes us want to stick around to grow that
community.

We said goodbye to Dan and his team late Wednesday
afternoon. Over some *awesome* vegetarian food at Monty’s Blue Plate Diner in Madison your co-op team started talking over all we had learned so far on our trip. A theme emerged – communication. From how we communicate information about products on Common Ground’s shelves; to how we communicate information between departments; to how I communicate fiscal goals to the managers; to creating channels for owners to communicate with one another (like parties and community events); to how owners to communicate their values through their co-op.  

Thursday morning greeted us with four inches of snow and more on its way. We left early and arrived in Janesville, WI, 40 miles south of Madison, at Basics Co-op around 9:30 am. Basics, while also much larger than Common Ground physically, does about 1.5 times the sales of our co-op and actually has about the same number of owners. Basics’ history is different than the other co-ops’ we had visited so far – for its first 27 years it was a privately owned supplement shop with only 25% of its sales coming from food. In
2005, Basics became a co-op and just expanded in September 2008, only a month after Common Ground completed its relocation to Lincoln Square Mall.  50% of their sales is now from organic and local foods, but they still have a very strong emphasis on supplements. The
Basics’ team invited us in out of the cold and enthusiastically shared with us about how their co-op works and the steps they took to get their new store location open. It was inspiring to see a store that had once been privately owned that had changed to a cooperative structure and been so enthusiastically embraced by its community.

It usually would have taken about 3.5 hours to get home, but it took us over seven hours to make the drive through Thursday’s snow. Luckily, the managers all get along well or being squished together in a tiny car driving on icy roads might have driven us over the brink! Instead, we had many impassioned conversations about all we had learned and all the new ideas we couldn’t wait to get home and put to work at our co-op. That’s co-opers for you, always thinking co-op, through rain or snow or freezing rain.  (Sorry, I couldn’t resist!)

In Cooperation,

Jacqueline