By Emily Votruba It is a chilly, rainy Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. A group of six are waiting in the turnaround of Suz McLaughlin\u2019s driveway on M-22, just inside Frankfort\u2019s city limits. Someone spreads out a tarp on the wet gravel. The big United Natural Foods semi-truck<\/a> is on its way, only about 15 minutes late.<\/p>\n Still Grinning Co-op, established in 1996, is the latest iteration of a cooperative natural food impulse in Benzie County that dates back at least to the early \u201980s. It has a membership of 32 households, about 10 of which make regular monthly orders of natural and organic bulk and processed foods, ecologically sensitive cleaning and personal care products, and many other items and brands that cannot be found anywhere else in the county.<\/p>\n I paid my $20 non-refundable lifetime membership fee and joined up almost as soon as I heard about this co-op, back in 2010. A veteran of fierce, pioneering, labor-intensive, large food co-ops in Brooklyn and Ithaca, New York, I did not need to be sold on the idea of a no-work co-op that would save me the time, gas expense, and sticker shock of trips to Oryana Natural Foods Market, a community cooperative since 1973 in Traverse City, where I had been heading about once a week for higher-quality cat food, bulk grains and nuts, organic spices, and my special addiction: Tandoor Chef frozen Indian dinners. I also found new things! Like 10-pound bags of inky Forbidden Rice, Madagascar pink salt, Nielsen Massey vanilla extract, and organic, full culture yogurt that comes in glass or cardboard containers that are safe for freezing.<\/p>\n I am going to come right out and say it now\u2014I am writing this article with one very selfish purpose: to drum up new members for our little co-op! The fact is, we are starting to have trouble meeting our total minimum order of $850 per month. (Full disclosure: both Current<\/em> owner-editors are also members of Still Grinning Co-op.)<\/p>\n Maybe I should start by explaining what a food co-op is. In our case, it is a collectively owned store with no store-age. Once a month, one of us (McLaughlin) submits our orders online with our distributor, United Natural Foods, and then, a week later, a huge semi-truck shows up with a bunch of undivvied-up boxes and bags of stuff that we have collectively bought at wholesale prices. There is no building overhead cost, no employees, no shelving, minimal packaging, no displays, no cashiers to pay, and McLaughlin and Richard Hitchingham take care of all of the office work, bank trips, and accounting for free, so there is absolutely no mark-up for members. The only catch is that the \u201cshopping\u201d day is once a month, and you have to come and get your stuff and take it with you right then, or it gets rained on.* <\/p>\n The co-op is great if you like to plan ahead, generally know what you want, have some storage-space wiggle room, and have prioritized driving less, using less packaging, and making ecologically responsible and healthful food choices. And if you can afford the initial outlay of $95 for a 50-pound bag of organic cane sugar, you can save the extra $138 (not to mention gas money, fumes, and drive time) that it would cost you to buy the very same product a pound at a time somewhere else.<\/p>\n Each member has a login to the UNFI website and a virtual shopping cart. What I like to do is build my cart over the course of the month, adding and subtracting things as my whims and budget dictate. Once a month, usually on a Thursday or Friday, McLaughlin sends out a warning that our \u201corders are due\u201d the following Monday. This is the time to finalize the cart and get realistic about how much kimchi I really need. <\/p>\n We get our delivery from the same truck that goes to Oryana and other stores in the region, and that means, almost anything you can get at the big O, you can get in McLaughlin\u2019s driveway, except for fresh fruits and veggies. But when the truck stops for us, instead of a stock team with scanners and pallet shifters and cool uniforms, the truck driver finds a small group of moist, yawning, middle-aged people, dressed for the varied occupations that they will resume a bit later in the day, usually waiting for just a few boxes, bags, a couple of toothbrushes, and some Ayurvedic soap.<\/p>\n What follows is no more than 20 minutes of \u201cWhose is this?\u201d \u201cDid I order that?\u201d \u201cWhere is my\u2026 oh, there it is.\u201d \u201cHey, I didn\u2019t get my…\u201d (If you really didn\u2019t get your _____ [which is rare], McLaughlin makes a note to have the co-op\u2019s longtime treasurer, Hitchingham, credit your account.) You hand McLaughlin your check, and then you go home and make towers out of your 96 rolls of unbleached recycled toilet paper.<\/p>\n If you are on top of what you ordered when you show up on truck day, it all goes pretty darn smoothly, and is certainly waaaaaay less work than other member co-ops, such as the Park Slope Food Co-op<\/a>, which, when I was a member, required a 3-hour-and-45-minute work shift every single month, during which I would organize CLIF bars, sweep up arrowroot spills, clean bathrooms, cut cheese (literally), weigh out spices into baggies and put price stickers on them, move cases of soda around in a dank basement, and figure out how to fit boxes of escapist kumquats, three-foot collard green stalks, and rutabagas I could barely palm all onto the same sloping shelf, while getting sprayed by the produce mister every 10 minutes or so and being literally pushed around and yelled at by a consortium of left and right anarchists, nondenominational Christians, and petulant hippies. God, I miss it.<\/p>\n Most co-ops start small, like Still Grinning is now, and grow until they end up with a store, because most people, it is true, do not like to buy 50 pounds of rolled oats at a time, and they really do not like it when their oats get sleeted on because they had to take their kid to the doctor and the truck was late, because the roads were really bad in Bear Lake. (Usually in these rare cases, with our small friendly group, we can work something out; I can pick up for you while you take Little Betty to school, and you can pick it up from my foyer later in the day.)<\/p>\n \u201cIt used to be that if you were a member of any co-op in the Michigan Federation, you were a member of the others. Oryana was the first to go rogue and have its own exclusive membership structure,\u201d McLaughlin says, explaining how the co-op landscape has changed. \u201cWe used to purchase from a co-op, a nonprofit organization of small distributors that couldn\u2019t compete with the big conglomerates. But, one by one, they got sucked up: Blooming Prairie, North Farms out of Wisconsin.<\/a> And before that, it was Michigan Federation of Food Co-ops, out of Ann Arbor<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n Benzie County is no longer quite the food desert it was when McLaughlin, Hitchingham, Will Amstutz, and several others signed on with a co-op called Lakeland<\/a> in the mid-\u201980s. They can remember the bad old days when the dining and shopping options were much less diverse and very short on healthful and fresh, let alone organic, free range, GMO-, gluten-, or cruelty-free. Lakeland was part of a network with members in several cities. For instance, Sally Cook, a Still Grinning member now, was a Lakeland member when she and her family lived in East Lansing.<\/p>\n \u201cLakeland was very well organized, but you had to volunteer work shifts as part of your payback,\u201d Amstutz says. \u201cIt was, at times, very cumbersome and time consuming. If you were an unloader, you unloaded, then another team did the splitting. You had to volunteer or be assigned, as a requirement. It was like, \u2018Why are we spending so much time doing this?\u2019 Part of it was the number of members\u2014it was big. About 84 people. You couldn\u2019t have 50 or 80 people showing up to rummage through hundreds of items, 30 people looking around saying \u2018Where\u2019s my cheese?\u2019 <\/p>\n So McLaughlin, Hitchingham, and Amstutz decided to go off on their own. <\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Why are we going off on our own?\u2019 I had to keep reminding myself, \u2018Because we need to keep it simple,\u2019\u201d Amstutz explains. \u201cThat was my input: \u2018Keep It Simple, Stupid.\u2019 I thought it would be great to have a KISS buying club. So we organized under extremely simple principles.\u201d<\/p>\n When it first formed in 1996, the new co-op met in various places to compile orders, receive deliveries, and then divvy up the goods. Remember, this was not exactly before the internet, but it was before most people were spending their every waking moment and a lot of their money online. <\/p>\n \u201cWe had one sheet with just a few things on it,\u201d Amstutz says of those early days. \u201cWe limited it to 12 members at first. If someone dropped out, someone else could come in.\u201d<\/p>\n Sally Cook remembers the meetings, where co-op members would gather to parse out shares of the bulk delivery, showing up with their own bags and jars. <\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019d have a huge tub of peanut butter. And it was the natural kind with the oil on top, so it had to be stirred first,\u201d Cook says.<\/p>\n \u201cEventually we got smart and got a drill with a paddle on it,\u201d McLaughlin chimes in.<\/p>\n \u201cBut someone still had to clean up all the oily, peanut buttery stuff afterward,\u201d says Cook, laughing. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd we had to do it in a public place, usually. We\u2019ve been in some weird places,\u201d McLaughlin says. First they met in what is now the Roadhouse restaurant<\/a> building in Benzonia. Then they met at FieldCrafts, a screen-printing and embroidery business<\/a> who employed a few Still Grinning members. Then they found a home at the Mills Community House<\/a>. For a while, they were meeting in the basement of L\u2019Chayim in Beulah. <\/p>\n Cook buys all of her flour from the co-op, despite that she does not bake as much now that her kids are grown. <\/p>\n \u201cI could maybe live without the co-op, but I would miss it,\u201d Cook says. \u201cThere are still some things you can\u2019t get in Benzie County. It takes some time to be a member of the co-op, but it takes more time to try to find some of this stuff in the stores. And sure, it\u2019s amazing what you can get now from Amazon. But it\u2019s a tradition in our family to belong to a co-op. Sometimes my daughter will [join in on] our order. I am always looking for something to add. Sometimes you find stuff that you end up really liking, like these canned peaches we can\u2019t get enough of now.\u201d<\/p>\n McLaughlin\u2019s catering company, Still Grinning Kitchens, specializes in local and organic food. (The Betsie Current<\/em> profiled McLaughlin and her business in a 2015 Q&A that you can read here.<\/a>) She has been the co-op\u2019s chief coordinator and order wrangler since \u201996, and she is not tired of it yet. <\/p>\n \u201cI do it for very personal, selfish reasons!\u201d she says, referencing choices for both her business and her home life.<\/p>\n Sharron and Paul May, of The May Farm in Frankfort<\/a>, have been members for 20 years, their main motivation being Oryana\u2019s prices and distance. <\/p>\n \u201c[Still Grinning Co-op is] a very grassroots, local alternative to the dominant paradigm for those of us scrappy die-hards who have chosen to cobble together an existence here,\u201d Sharron May says. <\/p>\n But we are an aging co-op, full of empty nesters and some, like me, never-been-full-nesters, and even though I do at least two-thirds of my grocery shopping through the co-op, there are months when I am one of only three or four orders, and that just does not cut it. So back in August 2016, we began discussing our future. It was Sharron May who volunteered to conduct a survey of the membership\u2014what can we do to improve the co-op, to amp up our monthly orders, and\/or how can we attract more members?<\/p>\n She had about 10 responses to her survey. Only two people said that they \u201cneeded\u201d the co-op (I was one). Three said it was a \u201cwant,\u201d one said it was both, and one said it was neither! And one person said they were just in it for the opportunity to buy Traverse City-based Higher Grounds Trading Company\u2019s coffee at a bulk discount<\/a>, another service that the co-op provides, separate from our account with UNFI.<\/p>\n The Pros<\/strong> The Cons, and Suggestions<\/strong>
\nCurrent Contributor<\/strong><\/p>\nSmall Is Beautiful (But Not Too Small\u2026)<\/h3>\n
United We Divide<\/h2>\n
Want or Need?<\/h2>\n
Are We Sustainable? Survey Says…<\/h2>\n
\nAmong the reasons cited for membership: <\/p>\n\n
\nThe Tuesday morning delivery time is a challenge for some people to fit into their work schedules. It has been suggested that we find a delivery place where items can be left for an entire day without getting wet, to provide some additional flexibility. Some have suggested ordering be every two months; retiree members and those without children do not necessarily need to order every month, and some members are now out of town during the winter. Some suggested going back to having meetings where orders are split up. Some people are overwhelmed by the billions of choices and have a hard time figuring out what to order; some are put off by the ordering interface, which requires a few steps to delete cart items and does not seem to have been designed by Apple. You need some access to a computer or a smart phone to place your order, unless you join forces with an existing member. <\/p>\nIs Still Grinning Co-op for You?<\/h2>\n