The Co-op Food Stores

added 02/06/08

-by Don Kreis, Board President_

Our cooperative has never made its way in the world by trashing its corporate counterparts in the grocery business. Nor have we groused about the growth of certain supermarket chains that have prospered essentially by making themselves look as much like food co-ops as possible. Still, with all that healthy food on the shelves of those chains—and, indeed, supermarkets everywhere—it’s worth noting that, sometimes, there really are differences between co-ops and corporate grocery stores. Here’s a case in point.

Two well-established environmental groups recently tried to get on the agenda of the annual meeting held by one of those chains that wants to look like a food co-op. The groups had a truly modest proposal that they wanted to discuss: requiring the company to report on progress toward energy efficiency and hold a discussion about it.

No way, responded the company. In fact, the founder and CEO declared that such shareholder presentations were a “waste of time” that threatened to turn his carefully orchestrated annual meeting into a “circus.”

To state the pleasantly obvious, any shareholder who has a concern about our cooperative is welcome to raise it when the members convene for our annual meeting in April. Our annual meeting is anything but slick and scripted, although the food is always great. But the point of this column is not to brag about that. It is to dare you, member-owner, to get feisty about the grocery business you own, just like the environmental groups tried to do with that grocery chain.

We laud our fidelity to the International Cooperative Principles, not least among them the notion of democratic member control. As the nation’s second largest retail food co-op, one of our region’s major employers, and a significant force in keeping the local agricultural sector vibrant, we have some bragging rights. We help other co-ops get started, we strive for sustainability, and we try to spread enlightenment about the relationship between food and health.

But are we doing enough? Are we truly democratic? (It bears noting that your newly installed board president (me) has twice been elected to the Board on an uncontested basis.) Are the skeptics among us giving us a free pass?

Democracy and complacency are fundamentally incompatible. John Carver, whose Policy Governance model guides your board, urges governing bodies of democratic institutions to practice “linkage” with the owners. “Linkage” may sound like a word an entomologist would use to describe ant reproduction, but as a concept, it is crucial to the survival of our institution. Without it, we might as well turn our stores over to some grocery magnate who thinks hearing from shareholders is a waste of time.

Historically, retail food cooperatives have thrived—not by imitating the competition—but by trying to be visionaries who meet social needs unnoticed by other economic institutions. England’s Rochdale cooperative, which touched off the movement, was founded in 1844 by factory weavers who banded together as consumers in order to struggle against their economic oppression in the industrial revolution. In the 1930s, Toyohiko Kagawa traveled the world to talk up co-ops as an alternative to communism, totalitarianism, and unfettered market capitalism. A number of American Depression-era co-ops, including our own, were the result.

So, what is it that you, the membership, expect of us? That is the question you can expect board members to be asking this year.