By Kenna S. Eaton, General Manager of The Food Co-op

Each month, I report to the board on how we are progressing on our long-term goals, which we call our Ends. These Ends reflect our aspirations—what we want to accomplish—and they are what makes us different from a regular grocery store. We publish these reports as a blog to keep our member-owners up to date on what we are doing.

 The reports are organized by our five Ends, although not all are discussed in every report. Our Ends say that, as a result of all we do—

-    Our community is well-served by a strong cooperative grocery store, integral to the lives of our customers, our farmers, and our producers.

-    Our community has a resilient local and regional food economy, supported by our Co-op and our community partners.

-    Our staff and board have the knowledge, skills, and passion to make our cooperative thrive.

-    Our members and customers are proud to shop at a local cooperative grocery that is working to reduce its impact on the environment.

-    Our community is informed, engaged, and empowered to join us in making a difference.

November General Manager’s Report

Working Together to Nourish our Community

 Market

The list of our Co+op Basics—good food at great prices—continues to grow. At the end of October, we received the final shipment of new Field Day items for the year. These include a dish gel, two flavors of nut-butter-filled pretzels, a canned 3-bean blend, and chicken broth.  We nowl have over 240 Field Day/Wild Harvest Co-op Basics items on the shelf!  And for the holidays we will be stocking Field Day stuffing mix.  

This year we added a new tofu to our selection of foods available in the Women, Infants & Children (WIC) program. House Foods organic cubes are precut for quicker and easier meals. We also hope to be able to add some new canned fruits and vegetables to our WIC offerings, once we review the latest updates to WIC rules. 

October was Co-op month. In addition to great informational articles in the weekly e-letter, we featured several co-operative brands, including Equal Exchange, Maple Valley, Pachamama, Moncaro & La Riojana wines. Look for two new Moncaro wines—Verdicchio and Nero d’avelo. At the shelf, shoppers can find signage identifying products that are cooperatively owned and/or are Fair Trade.

Food System

You’ll find several new seasonal local products are on the shelves:  Elevated Ice Cream pumpkin ice cream, Fiddlehead pumpkin spice dessert vegan ice cream, Two Crows pumpkin spice cookies, and Olivia gluten-free pumpkin pies. 

We received our last delivery of Silva’s late-season blueberries in mid-October. Next month we’ll have some numbers to celebrate those sweet seasonal goodies!

Environment

 Work is now progressing to put edges around the trees in the parking lot. Once edging is completed, our groundskeeper will be adding new plants to complete the look, moving us closer to our “green island” vision. At the south end of the building, our facilities team is preparing to repair the column damaged by a car this summer. Once that work is done, we’ll repaint the column and replace the reader board.

Finally, the roundabout work continues to make access to the parking lot a bit challenging, but fortunately two entrances are still open and available. We appreciate our members supporting their Co-op during this time, but we’re really looking forward to the work being completed this time next month!

Outreach

The Great Pumpkin arrived in October! Our yearly contest to guess the weight of the giant pumpkin is one of our favorite contests every year. After all the guesses came in and a winner was chosen, the pumpkin made its way to Sunfield farm for one of their annual festivals, to be turned into a fairy home. The member with the closest guess wins a $75 gift card.

In celebration of the season, we sponsored the Olympic Apple Cider Festival, which had events at many of our favorite local vendors, like Finnriver, Alpenfire, Wilderbee, and Eaglemount. 

Kids are back in school and so are the mentors. Once again, we will be helping with the Food Innovation Project at the high school, which encourages kids to learn about turning locally grown items into value-added products and teach them how take their products to market. This year we will be paying two of our staff to work with the students on this year-long project.

We sponsored the TILTH conference, which brought in farmers from all over Washington to discuss the state of agriculture now and into the future, and we ran an informational booth at the open market there.

Change for Change at the registers has switched in beneficiaries for the holiday season. Funds raised October through December will be donated in the form of gift cards to the Jefferson County Food Banks, so Food Bank customers can supplement their holiday food shopping.