Food Coop

The elite grocery store everyone wants to be a part of is a food coop in Brooklyn, NY. This food coop is located in an affluent neighborhood and is quite popular amongst its residents and the neighboring boroughs. A food co-op is a community grocery store that requires a membership to shop and even enter the store. However, there are many requirements and regulations that members must abide by. Some rules include volunteering for three hours every four weeks, paying an investment fee upon enrollment, and shopping for others besides yourself and your immediate family is prohibited. 

The coop sells whole organic foods at a lower cost, giving low-income people access to better foods. The food coop has a strong mission, to work as a team to create a community that allows the individual to succeed. The establishment relies on the volunteers' labor because there are few permanent hires. 

With hopes of better understanding the unique coop culture (the community amongst the members, the mission statement, and the intentions behind members involvement). I developed a research plan that the IRB (Institutional Review Board) approved and trained in the city research ethics. Qualitative data was obtained through observation and in-depth interviews with members and the founder of the food coop. The research design was based on the urban street corner research concept, looking at micro-culture (cultural practices and meanings) and social structure; I created a miniature ethnography. The opportunity to speak with the founder, Joe Holtz, and multiple members allowed me to gather a well-rounded, and deeper understanding of coop culture. The members were asked how the coop has affected their lives, and if they feel a sense of community amongst the members. 

All the informants rely on the food coop for their groceries, but a few informants show us that the coop means much more to them than a grocery store. Some people have become so connected to the coop community and support the mission that they have decided to continue their membership after moving. People want to be a part of the coop for the sake of themselves and others—Holtz says it is a self-help community. One informant explained that she wanted to be a member to have access to the products, but also because her role in the establishment would help to advance the company's mission of assisting low-income individuals to have greater access to better food. She said that her participation is meaningful to her because she has siblings and friends who are low-income. 

Joe Holtz wanted to create a community of people who worked together to create something they could individually benefit from. Gathering some of Holtz’s words, he wanted to build a place where people had access to locally sourced food at their own expense—to have access to the food, they had to work for it, it became a give-and-get system. Multiple informants mentioned how they are glad to be a part of a community, for example, informant four describes how people at the food coop treat one another with a different level of respect than would be seen at any other grocery store.

Despite the caring energy that circulated the coop, we can see a riff in the community created. In multiple accounts, we see people who have been a part of the coop for a longer time speaking down to the newer members of the food coop. In the situation with the women in line, the older women who had been a part of the coop for a while spoke to the younger women with sass. In this situation, the man who had worked at the coop for three years spoke to the newer member with superiority and smugness. Although there is a community within the coop, informant four explains his different interactions with coop shoppers, a hierarchy within the community is very challenging to avoid.

Whyte’s Street Corner Society speaks about a specific microculture on a community street corner in Chicago (the people within this community would be considered low-income). The finding of this study would conclude that the functionalist theory would best describe the community. The functionalist theory covers the concept that everything has a specific role, and when executed correctly, society can function. The other aspect of the functionalist theory is that all the roles and pieces of the micro-society do not make sense to outsiders.

Whyte's display of functional theory in his work can apply to the coop microculture. Each member must complete their role within the establishment to ensure it will function properly. In this case, all the members hold multiple roles, including the work they do for the coop, and the money they spend shopping. To outsiders, it might seem absurd that people spend money at an establishment and work for free. However, as Oliver Willow says in his interview, people tend to forget that the food coop is still a business—there needs to be some compensation for the low prices. The compensations are the members working for free and the initial 100-dollar investments, even though that money does not stretch very far.

After the multiple weeks I spent collecting research data on the food coop in Brooklyn, it can be said that there is a strong sense of community within the establishment—all the members are very dedicated to the coop. Despite their reasons for this, whether it is just for the specialty items and cheap food or to play a small role in the overall mission statement of the coop, the members will continuously work and shop at the location for years on end. The food coop impacts the members' lives to such an extent that they remain members even when they move out of the neighborhood.  

December 2023