It’s a bizarre sight: rows of polished church pews, each dotted with neat piles of fruit or veg. Shoppers scoop heaps into baskets, trolleys, or crumpled plastic bags saved from previous trips to Tesco.
This is a weekly food shop, cooperative style – a model of food distribution where neighbours work together to take control of their local supply chain. The system is simple: find a supplier, buy in bulk and collectively cover the costs. Smaller co-ops will only buy what participants have ordered, whereas larger organisations operate as markets or even set up their own shops. Some of these “community” co-ops invite customers to become members. You pay a nominal fee to be able to shop from it, or have a say in how it is run. Others are more informal and open to all. There are also “workers'” co-ops, which are often much larger organisations, where paid employees share all key business decisions.
The concept, of course, is far from new, but it’s proving increasingly popular. “Interest is definitely growing,” says John Atherton of Co-operatives UK, an organisation that supports cooperative enterprise across Britain. “We’re seeing rising numbers of buying groups and community shops. It’s a trend that is set to continue.”
The motivations are many: fears about food security; food inflation; the power of supermarkets; the bruised image of capitalism; a lost sense of community.
Across Britain, food co-ops are sprouting up in school halls, community centres, farm sheds or even your neighbour’s front room – anywhere, in fact, where rent is free.
“I use the term ‘trust trading’,” says Dan Dempsey, manager of a project establishing food co-ops in Wales. In essence, he says, it’s about a return to traditional routes of trade: reconnecting farmers with communities, and countryside to cities; paying a fair price and avoid markups by middlemen.
With strong backing from the Welsh assembly, his team has helped to launch 180 food co-ops in the last three years, supplying 6,000 families and turning over around £1m. “We’re cracking the system,” he says. “Supermarkets don’t have to dominate.”
It was this notion of trust that inspired the Rochdale Pioneers, established in 1844 and widely regarded as the first successful food co-op. At the time, food adulteration was commonplace. Unscrupulous traders were known to whiten flour with alum (plaster of paris) and dry used tea leaves before reselling them. Not much has changed: from the current scare over pork contaminated with dioxins, to the melamine-in-baby-milk scandal in China, the parallels could not be more striking.
