An Open Letter to Our Members

Dear CoG Members:

Thanks for writing and sharing your concerns. We understand that your expectations about what the CoG promises to be aren't yet represented by your first ordering experience. Please allow us to explain a little about what's happening at this first moment of bringing the store "live" to our current members.

This first order was a way for us to establish our relationship with our largest distributor, UNFI. Since we are a cooperative relying only on the membership investments that we have raised so far, we don't have a bankroll to purchase all of our inventory ahead of time in large amounts. Therefore, we have to build our inventory slowly and then work on bringing our volume up before UNFI will give us similar wholesale prices that they give other natural food stores in the area. This could take a couple of months. Since our markup on products does not have to cover labor costs, our prices should be less than or comparable to theirs overall even at this early stage, but once our volume increases (fewer than 50 members placed orders this first time), our prices will decrease significantly. Again, this might take a few months since we are a non-profit endeavor and there is no markup beyond that of paying the rent and utilities at this point.

As far as bulk goes, we are in the process of finishing some plumbing that the Health Department requires before we can bring in bulk items. We're hoping to have that all done in December. At that point, yes, we will purchase huge bags of basic foods that the members will then divide up into smaller amounts for other members' orders. This will also include oils and maple syrup and nut butters - you name it. And local products will begin to be added as early as the next order.

For this first order, we only offered products that are distributed by UNFI since their warehouse/delivery system takes quite a bit of choreography to add a new account, and we needed to make sure the system on our end works with theirs. We already have accounts in the works with Vital Vittles, Bernie's Apple Juice, Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates, Grateful Body Skin Care, EcoLani, as well as a local raw honey producer, and we are constantly working on adding more. But we do need to offer "regular" nationally distributed natural foods products as well if we are to expect that members will be able to do the majority of their shopping at the CoG. There simply aren't local producers of toilet paper or canned tomatoes or laundry soap, or dried pastas. Further, many members still want to be able to buy some processed foods, so we will carry those as well. We will only carry the most sustainable of these items, but we will need to use a distributor like UNFI to be able to do so. Once our refrigeration system in in place (mid-2008), this relationship will even be more important since many frozen and chilled items are only carried by distributors.

We recognize that the store doesn't look like what many members imagined it to at this very moment, but it will soon be everything we promised it to be. We do see that we could have been much more transparent about what the process has been like getting things going up to this point, but even that requires a great deal of work, and the five of us have really been on overload since we found the site (especially considering that we all work 'real' jobs and have, between us all, 7 children). We do have some communications going out now that hopefully explain our process a little bit better.

Thanks again for writing. We truly appreciate you writing to us to share your concerns. We are confident that you will be happy with the CoG once things fall into place. And thanks for your patience.

all the best,
Julia (on behalf of all of us at the CoG)