by Gail Falk, Staff Writer
Each grocery shopper at the Co-op is looking for something a little different from every other shopper. To some, low price is most important. Some seek out meat and produce from local farms. Others want to be sure their food is organically grown. Still others are looking for familiar brands. Recently, General Manager Jeannine DeWald shared with the Newsletter her thoughts about how the store selects the products on its shelves.
As the Co-op hits its stride at its new location, it is seeing a growing variety of shoppers. “Members who had stopped shopping at the old location for a variety of reasons, including product selection and pricing, have returned and caught up on equity payments they hadn’t paid in years,” says DeWald. “And we have inherited many Plainfield Hardware shoppers. As hoped, our location and broader product selection make us accessible to a broader slice of the surrounding communities.”
Responding to the store’s variety of shoppers is a balancing act. “It’s important not to think of shoppers as those who buy organic and those who buy conventional. Dividing the community into those who can afford solely organic and those who can afford solely conventional creates a sense of ‘othering’ people, which is not what we are here to do. In fact, most shoppers are purchasing a mix of both,” says DeWald.
“Our goal” she says,” is to offer an array — a balance of local, organic and conventional products,” The pasta department is an example of the array the Co-op strives to achieve: one shelf has gluten-free pasta, one shelf is organic in a range of quality, and one shelf has conventional pasta.
The nitty-gritty work of sorting through vendors’ websites and catalogs to find the best prices and choices is done by buyers Lisa Howard and Dawn Welch. They are constantly on the lookout for sales and ways of responding to consumer requests and offering competitive prices.
The store is now offering a line of conventional affordable cereals and has added low-cost conventional canned beans and tomatoes. The Co-op is still building up its inventory of wellness products, which had been depleted at the time the store changed hands. Here, too, the store strives to achieve a balance of high-end local and organic soaps and creams with conventional body care products.
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The store’s offerings are based upon what our distributors offer. Hibbert and McGee, based in East Barre, distributes general groceries and sundries to small grocery stores in our area, including many general stores. We would have more choices if we qualified to do business with the two large conventional vendors in the area, but right now we don’t meet the minimum volume requirements. Distributors KeHE and UNFI supply us with natural and organic products. These distributors carry private label organic products from Cadia and MadeWith. Cadia is a brand of natural and organic foods offered exclusively to independent natural food stores so they can compete with big box stores. Their products are good quality and more affordable than well-known organic brands.
DeWald will be meeting with representatives from the National Cooperative Grocers (NCG) to learn what our store will have to do to qualify for membership. NCG is an association of cooperative groceries that use their collective power to negotiate with vendors. NCG membership would boost our ability to offer favorable prices and sales.
Often, organic bulk food is cheaper than packaged conventional food. For instance, organic bulk rice or oatmeal may be less costly than the conventional packaged grains. In that case, the Co-op may choose not to stock the conventional product, and it’s a matter of educating customers to look in the bulk section. Customers still have the option of saving money by special ordering, such as a 10-pound bag of rice, or 20 pounds of beans.
DeWald says that the balance of organic and conventional fruits and vegetables the Co-op is now selling is similar to that in the old store. When available and affordable, buyers choose organic and local. As always, supply is based on price and availability, and sometimes the quality of organic produce is not up to par, and other times organic produce is available only in a volume too large for the store to sell before it goes bad.
The work to balance quality and affordability is nothing new to the Co-op, but as the store expands its customer base, it is also expanding the choices it offers. Expanding the product lines offers greater choices that meet people’s budgets as well as their individual preferences.