Of course our Arroyo Food Co-op won’t be standing alone. It will be backed up by a producers, suppliers, lenders, staff and consultants. Our membership base supplies the energy, capital, loans and sales but we need help from the rest of the world to open our doors and fill our shelves.
To represent all these folks in our business plan we offer this industry diagram. Here we’ve attempted to explain how our co-operative business will fit in with the rest of the world and how it will help grow our little corner of the world just a little. Click here, or on the image, to open a larger version of the diagram.
Our business plan also includes an diagram explanation which is copied below. Give it a look and use the “Add a new comment” link below if you have any comments.
“Food cooperative stores operate much like independent grocery stores. They offer a wide variety of products and services with the goal of satisfying as many grocery needs for their customers as possible. Co-ops are also similar to health food stores in that their offerings focus on items that are either made from healthier ingredients or are produced in a way that has less impact upon our environment than products offered by conventional stores. For the most part they all rely upon other industries for the products that they sell.
Cooperative food stores stand apart from health food stores in that they are member owned. Anyone can shop at the co-op, but those that become members through capital investment benefit in additional ways. Members are eligible for special sale offers and for distribution of some co-op profit through patronage refunds. Members can also vote for or run for Board of Director positions. This way they can have a say in the direction that the enterprise is heading. Moreover, all successful businesses try to keep their owners happy. So member-owners tend to receive more attention from the co-op than they would from a conventional grocery store.
All these additional benefits tend to build store loyalty. This helps to keep the business profitable but also provides a healthy number of shopper requests and suggestions that allow the co-op to refine how it interacts with its supplier industries. Without having to live within a multi-store corporate model, cooperatives have more freedom to adjust based upon member feedback. Some co-ops have decided to be strictly vegetarian since this is what the members requested Other co-ops aggressively search out local businesses to provide better products than are available through existing supply channels.
This “local factor” seems to be a part of many existing cooperatives ? at least informally. The Arroyo Food Co-op Founding Team would like to encourage this in more formal ways. We'd like to offer classes to introduce our community to skill sets that could help them personally and might lead a few to undertake business ventures that would end up supplying the co-op with specialty products. We'd like to be able to offer a code-compliant kitchen on a rental basis and some kind of business development services to help these new ventures get started.
We hope to make use of the bounty of fruits and vegetables that our area is already producing. Ideas put forth but subject to full vetting are: selling the produce in the co-op, offering a neighborhood farmer's market and/or purchasing the produce and processing it into salable items.
We also want to offer the community more options for socializing. Hence the inclusion of a cafe and a brew pub in our plans. Although Altadena does already have establishments that offer similar services we would benefit from variations that offer more “green” selections. These options will build loyalty and provide more feedback to help our cooperative thrive.
Back to: Executive Summary
Next up: Phases of Development
=================================================