Report from a session at the 2019 Co-op Retail Conference
Speaker: Stephen McDow, Keystone Development Center (https://www.kdc.coop)
Keystone Development Center is dedicated to supporting groups to set-up and organise as co-ops in the mid-Atlantic region (PA, NJ, DE, MD and parts of NY)
Visiting from the USA, Stephen gave an interesting and insightful presentation into the co-operative landscape and trends in the USA, particularly in grocery retail. He began by pointing out that a large segment of the US grocery market as represented by the ‘dollar stores’ was predatory, targeting poorer people, and that their commercial expansion (over 50,000 stores) was predicated on the growth of a permanent underclass.
In the USA seven grocery co-ops account for 13% of revenue ($28 billion) of the country’s top 100 co-ops. Grocery co-ops tend to only operate one or a handful of stores, unlike in the UK. Stephen had a particular focus on bringing together rural and urban co-ops, bridging the gaps in training and education to better support the agricultural supply chain and the grocery co-op landscape. Key overlapping rural and urban challenges were how we educate the next generation of workers to understand ‘farm to fork’ supply chains through as the co-operative difference and co-op principles.
The examples of two Philadelphia grocery co-ops highlighted this challenge:
- one with 9000 members, £7 million sales, 150 employees and 3 locations which had achieved 300% growth over 12 years, and which had developed a good relationship with local schools was prospering.
- the other was created as a result of the local community raising $2.4 million capital to set up a co-op following on from a successful community mobilisation. However, this co-op closed within two years.
The main reason given for the community co-op’s closure was the difficulty in changing buying habits, whilst for the successful co-op its close links with local education providers was seen as a major benefit. The key question therefore identified by Stephen was: how do you educate the marketplace and get people to understand the co-op advantage? For grocery co-ops in the USA one solution was presented as being educating up through the education system, particularly around the farm to fork supply chain. In the USA one way to achieve this is through the use of a supplementary educational curriculum that can be funded publicly or privately.
This is obviously a question of critical importance to all co-ops and co-operators. The development of a Principle 5 policy and programme in relation to co-operative member education and training is something the Co-op Group National Members’ Council is looking at closely.