A Word from the General Manager

Hello Cooperators,

I hope you are all doing well and staying as cool as possible as the weather has really been warming up over the past week!

I have not yet highlighted in our newsletter our exciting Buy One Get One Free (BOGO) promotions. All co-ops that are part of National Cooperative Grocers (NCG) are eligible for some fantastic deals to offer our owners. We get this opportunity a few times a year to offer incredible savings on some of our most popular items and they are almost always seasonal! We just began one this week that will last until June 20th and features such items as Beyond Meat Burger Patties, Bizzy Cold Brews and Luna and Larry Ice Cream Bars! You can see all of the BOGO items online on our website. 

For our members that have not yet learned about our supply structure, I will give a short explanation of NCG and what our relationship with them does for our organization. NCG is a co-op and acts as a pseudo-corporate headquarters for over 160 co-ops throughout the United States. NCG works for us and is composed of professionals in all areas of grocery store management. They have professionals available in the areas of Marketing, Finance, IT, Operations and Store Management for every department. Whenever we have needs that we are not sure how to respond to, there is always someone at NCG that has helpful advice for us. Unlike a true corporate office, we are under no obligation to take direction from them; they are more like a security blanket that we can utilize to ensure that we are always aware of best practices in the grocery industry. NCG is divided into three corridors, East, West, and the Central Corridor that we are in. We have the ability to not just contact NCG for help, we can also contact any of the peer stores throughout the country but mostly we have contact with those in our own corridor that most resemble our own. Other co-ops can, and have, contacted us for assistance as well.

Now, back to the BOGO deals. One of NCG's major functions for co-ops is to negotiate pricing with Unified Natural Foods Incorporated (UNFI), our main source of products that we can not get locally, and delivers to us three times each week. Without the assistance of NCG to handle the price negotiations, we would need to do this for ourselves. As a single store trying to negotiate pricing, we would not be able to get very good costs on most items, but with NCG negotiating for a large number of co-ops we can get much better deals that help lower our costs and allow us to offer products to our owners and customers at competitive prices. One of the negotiations that NCG has been working on is this Buy One, Get One Free program that has proven to be very popular in conventional stores and we are finding that it is incredibly popular for co-ops as well!

Our next BOGO promotion will not come out until early fall so please come on in and take advantage of this one while it lasts!

Thank you for reading, and please, don't forget the sunscreen!

Gary