The Co-op Food Stores

added 02/19/08

From the Editor by Rosemary Fifield, Education and Member Services Director

It’s not every day that a food co-op makes the cover of a nationally distributed trade magazine. Well-known chain stores and hugely successful family-owned businesses such as Wegmans are more likely to be the subject of a cover story directed toward supermarkets, mass merchandisers, convenience stores, and other food retailers.

The cover of the January/February 2008 issue of Refrigerated and Frozen Foods Retailer, however, shows two Lebanon Co-op employees—Jon Dubuque and Jesse Johnson—monitoring the temperature of dairy products, with the headline: “Food Safety: In the Trenches; Here’s how one leading-edge independent makes it happen.”

Inside, the multi-paged cover article with additional photos of Co-op employees on the job, tells the story of our Co-op’s dedication to safeguarding its members and customers via an active food safety program. Through an interview with three members of the Co-op’s food safety advisory committee-Paul Hoffman, Tony White, and myself-author Warren Thayer highlights the standard operating procedures and training programs our co-op has established as well as the challenges it experiences. He refers to the Co-op as “a rare consumer advocate” and notes that our free 24-page Co-op News is filled with information on consumer and member issues but makes not a single effort to sell a product.

With a distribution of 12,000 hard copies, Refrigerated and Frozen Foods Retailer (www.rffretailer.com) reaches employees of the industry’s leading chains, wholesalers, and distributors, as well as food and beverage manufacturing companies. We at the Co-op consider it an honor to be featured in the magazine and wish to thank Warren Thayer, who is also the editorial director and associate publisher of the magazine and a contributing editor at Private Label Buyer. Warren is a Co-op member and a resident of Norwich, Vermont.

Saying Goodye

It is with great sadness that we note the passing of our colleague and friend, Bill Johnson. Bill joined the Co-op staff in 1997 and was well-known to shoppers in the frozen food aisle of our Lebanon store. He was a quiet, warm-hearted individual with a wide smile and strong moral convictions. He periodically sported a thick ponytail of dark hair that he would then cut off and contribute to an organization that provides human hair wigs to needy children suffering from long-term medical hair loss. We will miss seeing Bill in the aisles and at our managers’ meetings.