General Manager’s Blog

by Kenna S. Eaton

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.

July General Manager’s Report

Working Together to Nourish our Community

Market Relevance

I’d like to start this report with a co-op success story: We have a two new wines from a cooperative in Italy—Moncaro pinot grigio and sangiovese. The 850 families in the cooperative grow almost 3500 acres of organic grapes. Before COVID began, Moncaro contacted La Riojana because of their success with coop-to-coop sales. La Riojana agreed to share all their US distributor contacts and now, a few years later, we have Moncaro wine on our shelves.

Sales for the end of May and into June remained strong, thanks to our members. We re-opened part of the hot bar earlier in the month and have been very pleased by the positive feedback. We cut back on packaging the hot food and now most of it is self-serve again. The cold bar is still pre-packed as that keeps it fresher.

In mid-June Coop2GO, our curbside shopping service, relocated the pickup location to the south side of the store. For multiple reasons, we think this will work better both for staff and customers. For those who haven’t yet tried our free shopping service, we encourage you to go our website (www.foodcoop.coop) and check out the thousands of items we offer.

And finally, we’re launching a member survey beginning July 6th. Working with various cooperative partners, we’ll be sending out an online survey link to randomly selected members (assuming we have your current email address). All who complete the survey will be eligible to win one of four $50 gift cards to the Co-op.

Food System Development

We’ve been working on developing a process for new vendors to will help them prepare to sell us their products. While any new vendor can use it, the packet was developed to ensure that our local entrepreneurs were fully prepared before they came to us with their fabulous goods. This interactive tool combines product guidelines with preparedness checklists as well as application forms. We hope to launch it on our website by the end of the summer—sooner if I have my way!

Wow–look at our local eggs! We have a new local egg vendor called Chicken & Egg. You can read more about them in the Eat Local First listings at https://eatlocalfirstolypen.com under Bekkevar Farm, near Sequim.

· 12% of our egg sales are from Local 5 vendors, an average of 170 dozen per week.

· 86% of our egg sales are from Local WA farms – Wilcox Family Farm in Roy & Stiebrs Farms in Yelm.

· So far this year, there were only four days when we had no local eggs to sell! This success was due to increased production by Solstice Farm, larger orders from Chimacum Eggs, and more consistent vendor deliveries.

· In 2020, we sold an average of 45 dozen local eggs per week.

· In 2021, we sold an average of 170 dozen per week!

And since local produce is HOT right now, we’re super excited that our long awaited new produce case is finally scheduled to be installed the week of July 12th. The installation process does mean that all refrigerated produce cases will need to be turned off for 24 hours, but we’re looking forward to the results and figure it’s worth the temporary disruption.

Thriving Workplace

We have hired 14 new employees or filled positions from in-house this year, 13 since March 31. Four more are in process as I write. Depending on if we backfill the internal hires, we’ll have six open positions left to fill. This number changes daily as offers are made to internal and external applicants. We have also had an enthusiastic response to our signing incentive bonus—most staff who make referrals are selecting an extra day of PTO.

Environmental Sustainability

Recently, we realized that our propane usage has been steadily increasing. We ran a leak test and ruled out that possibility. Now we’re looking into other reasons we might be using more propane per square foot than previously. So far it appears the recent additions such as a second large hot water tank and increased oven usage as a result of increased food services sales are likely contributing factors. Our team is working on how to mitigate those items, as well as conducting further research to identify the culprit(s).

In our meat/seafood department, we recently learned that the compostable meat trays we’ve been using are no longer being produced by the manufacturer, although an alternative is being researched by the distributor. In the meantime, the options are either a foam tray or a recycled PET (#1 plastic) tray, and will depend on which one is currently available.

Kenna, GM