A Word from the General Manager

Hello Cooperators!

I hope you have all recovered from the power outages and downed trees the last few days! Here at the Co-op we were able to weather the storm without loss of very much product. We lost power from around 1:15 pm to 4:20 pm and were able to reopen the store at 5 pm on Thursday. We were preparing for a much longer power outage and I want to shout out Sola Gratia Farm for being willing to send us a refrigerated truck to use to save a lot of food. Thankfully we did not end up having to use it but we were so grateful to have that option!

Last month I wrote about our relationship with National Cooperative Grocers (NCG) and thought I would talk a little bit about one of their services that we will be using in the last week of July. We made the decision to invest in some new Produce fixtures to spruce that department up a little bit. This will be the first time we have upgraded/invested in that department since the 2012 expansion and it is long overdue. Tim Domini, a Produce merchandising expert, is one of our partners at NCG and he will be coming into town to assist our team with a Produce Department overhaul! We are looking forward to his arrival and are excited to see what his suggestions will be to help the appearance and sales of our Produce Department!

The last thing I want to mention in this letter is about the recent approval by the FDA of synthetic, lab-grown "chicken." This product, grown from chicken cells, is now approved for sale and consumption in restaurants in the US. It will be labeled as "cell-cultivated" on the packages when it eventually becomes available to the general public. According to news sources, it is expensive to produce so it may be quite some time before it will be sold in stores. I mention this because the US is only the second country to approve it; Singapore was first and I wanted to make sure everyone is aware of it because our third end states that we are an educational resource on food issues. Only time will tell if this becomes generally accepted as a protein source. Even though it will be quite some time before this product could possibly be available for sale, I would be very interested to hear our owner's take on this topic. Please send your thoughts to gm@commonground.coop.  

Thanks for reading, and please, keep an eye on the heat indexes in the coming summer months!

Take Care,

Gary