Stillwater food co-op has built community of shoppers
The club, or grocery co-op, is yet going strong today. The original store, called the Dale Co-op, started with 15 members.
Housed in the basement of a momentous construction in downtown Stillwater, it had stone walls, a stone floor, and large bins brimming with whole grains, rice, granola and peanut butter. Besides in the store: 50-gallon drum of homegrown honey. From its backward origins, Stillwater's only food co-op has grown up.
Last month blatant its 30th anniversary. River Mart Community Co-op, as the set aside is known today has almost 4,000 members and occupies a prominent room on Leading Street, right on the St. Croix River.
The bulk foods section store more than 750 items. Staff members include an herbalist and a physical trainer. And annual receipts apex $4 million.
The changes, say member employees, reflect the evolution of the Look-alike Cities co-op movement from tiny start-ups with very little money and inventory to cosmopolitan businesses with an established presence in the food industry.
In spite of increased striving from grocery store chains that carry biological and yet bulk foods, Watercourse Marketplace has survived for three decades because the St.
Croix Valley regional has embraced the co-op concept, said Mead Stone, general manager of River Market. It is a store where human beings can come together, where people see friends, where people can talk," he said.
The livelihood remainder on the strength of the community." One circumstance that's remained consistent over the years is the customers' values, said longtime colleague and employee Sharona Erickson.
They really do burden about what they're eating, its relation to their own condition and the contact their eating has on the world," she said. Co-ops are businesses owned by the fellow of the business.
But nonmembers also can department store at the stores. Waterway Market is one of about 15 co-ops in the seven-county underground area.
Minnesota has a rich ritual of co-op activity, said Gail Graham, general executive of Mississippi Bazaar in St. Paul and a co-op historian. It goes wager to the turn of the century with the Scandinavian population up in the Iron Range," she said.
The Finns, back then they brought the entire consideration of cooperation back from Finland." In the mid-to-late 1970s, there were more than 30 co-ops in the Twin Cities, Graham said.
The ones that remain after three decades are generally thriving, she said, on the other hand distinct include faced defy over the years.
A couple years ago, River Market's livelihood suffered when the Stillwater lift span closed for a few months, cutting elsewhere Wisconsin customers. About 20 percent of the co-op's customers aware in Wisconsin.
Approximately the same time, Kowalski's opened off of Hwy. 36 in Stillwater. There were stretch when some of us were worried that we weren't going to make it," said Marianne Barratt, River Market's general merchandise buyer.
Her memories of the co-op in its ahead of time days admit characters like the "cheese ladies," a category of volunteers who would come into the co-op to handle the cheese, Barratt explained.