Have you ever walked through the aisles of the supermarket and realised your trolley isn’t half full yet but the cost already feels heavy? You stick to a strict shopping list, swapping brands and cutting items, just for the total to still make you wince at the checkout.
Well what if it didn’t need to be this way and instead you could save up to 40% on shopping each week?
As it turns out, this is entirely possible through food cooperatives – independent not-for-profit groups run by the community which purchase quality food in bulk and feed it to themselves at significant discount, and according to Cooperation Town Sheffield all you need to set one up is a few people and some determination.
Launched in 2009 on an estate in Kentish Town in north London with the aim of promoting solidarity in place of charity, Cooperation Town discovered demand was high for affordable food.
Since then they have been one of the organisations pioneering the creation of food co-ops in the UK and currently have over 50 autonomous co-ops in their network.
Mikee Whitson, co-ordinator of Cooperation Town Sheffield says: “We’re about going into areas where co-ops don’t exist to let people know about the community power that can exist if they work together.”
The groups fund themselves, everyone chips in a few pounds each week and which give the co-op funds to buy a mass amount of food from a wholesaler and distribute it back to their group at an inexpensive price. A box of food worth £15-20 can now be sold for £2.
“You basically only need three things to set up a food co-op: food supply, venue, and a group of people.”
Voluntary Action Sheffield (VAS) decided to support Cooperation Town because they wanted to look at an alternative model of food provision to food banks.
“The dependency a food bank creates can be inherently flawed. If you’re giving food out for free, there can be a lack of funding which is not sustainable, and when that food bank closes what happens to the people who used it?
“Success in my job is setting a cooperative up and leaving it to run itself, of course at first there might be some sort of structure that needs to be put into the group, like who’s going to do the register, who’s going to divide the food but sustainability is key to this whole thing.
“You give people the connections, the resources, the power of their own decision making and you create systems that can pay for themselves,” Mikee says.
If you’re interested in starting your own food co-op you can find information here.
