Co-op Market

Grocery & Deli

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Monday - Saturday: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Sunday: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
526 Gaffney Road
Fairbanks, AK 99701
907.457.1023

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Listening Sessions: You Can Help Us Plan for the Future

April 19, 2018 By Kristin Summerlin 2 Comments

What do you value about your co-op? When you think about Co-op Market in five years, what do you envision? If you shop at the co-op, our board of directors and management want to hear from you.

Our doors have been open for five years now! Before that we spent six years preparing to open.

Since opening we’ve grown from $2.5 million to almost $4 million in annual sales.

We work with 52 local vendors and are looking for more.

We opened our doors because of you. More than 115 co-op Owners made loans to help us open, and more than 3,700 Owners have invested in our co-op through member equity.

We will be paying back loans for a few more years, so it isn’t quite time to begin planning for expansion. But now is the time for the board and management to start working on a five- to 10-year strategic plan.

Your input will help us hammer out our core values and craft a shared vision. You can help create the framework for making important decisions about our co-op’s future.

As part of its strategic planning process, the board is hosting a series of listening sessions. Please join us on one of the following dates for good food and conversation about the future of your co-op.

• Sunday, April 22, 5 to 8 p.m.
• Tuesday, June 5, 4 to 7 p.m. (Postponed. New date to be announced.)
• Tuesday, July 31, 1 to 4 p.m

All sessions will be held at JP Jones Community Development Center, 2400 Rickert Street.

For more information on the listening sessions and strategic planning process, please email Anduin McElroy, board chair, or Mary Christensen, general manager.

Everyone is welcome!

Filed Under: Events, Issues, Ownership, Strategic plan

Worried about Sam’s Club closing? We can help.

January 12, 2018 By Kristin Summerlin 1 Comment

With the announcement that Sam’s Club will close its doors at the end of the month, many people are worried about the negative impact on restaurants and small businesses in our community. We understand the concern and know this will affect not only restaurants and businesses, but also people with large families, those who live in the Bush, and many military families.

We can help.

Special Order Discounts
You probably already know that you can save money by shopping in our Bulk Foods aisle. But did you know that you can get a discount when you order staples in bulk or cases of the groceries on our shelves? Owners receive a 10% discount on special orders, but anyone can place a special order and receive a 5% discount. (These discounts apply to non-sale items.)

Stretching Co+op Deals Sales
If you’re familiar with our twice-monthly Co+op Deals flyer, you know that these sales represent significant savings. Did you know you can special order cases of these items anytime during the flyer period and receive the sale price, no matter when the product actually arrives in the store? This is a great way to take advantage of special pricing to stretch your grocery budget.

Case Pricing on Overstock
From time to time, we do find ourselves with overstock. We will offer case pricing on these items, while supplies last. Look for them on the back endcap near the dairy products. (We’re setting it up with some Bob’s Red Mill products later today.)

Business Accounts
If you’re a fully invested co-op Owner who also owns a small business or restaurant, we can help you source high quality organic and natural products for use in your business. We can offer bulk bags or cases of products, including fresh produce, at our cost, including shipping, plus 20%. If you purchase items for your business from our shelves (rather than ordering by the case), we offer a 10% discount.

This offer is only extended to licensed businesses that use the products for resale. Eligible businesses include small restaurants, bed & breakfasts, inns and tour operators – any small business that purchases groceries for large groups of people. (Business discounts only apply to groceries used for business. Family groceries must be purchased at our regular prices.)

You can find our business account application here.

We do understand the gap Sam’s Club’s closing creates. We also see it as an opportunity to do more for our community. We’re exploring ways to offer even more savings and benefits to bridge that gap. And because we’re a community-owned grocery store, we don’t have outside shareholders who would rather close a store to maximize profit at the expense of community. We belong to you, and we’re here to stay!

P.S. Don’t forget our annual Truckload Sale in May! We expect this year’s sale to be even bigger and better than ever!

Filed Under: Business, Issues, Ownership

Shipping Update: Our Shelves Are Filling Up

February 5, 2016 By Kristin Summerlin Leave a Comment

We’re happy to report that our freight is finally moving again, and we’ve been working hard to get the store shelves stocked full. On Wednesday, we received 9 pallets of groceries (as opposed to our usual 3 or 4). Busy stockers are happy stockers!

super stockersAll of Alaska took notice when grocery shelves began emptying out last month. The breakdown of a cargo vessel at the port in Tacoma disrupted food deliveries to Alaska. When other stores were running out of meat, we were stocking our case with local beef and pork. And while we did run low on fruits and veggies, we took the opportunity to deep clean our shelves.

We also thought it was important to share information about the shipping delays with our customers.

Many people wondered why we were willing to talk to the media when the other stores wouldn’t or couldn’t. It’s simple: Our Owners are our friends and neighbors, not faceless shareholders who live far away. We are a part of this community, and we feel that it is important to share information with the community.

You’ve probably heard that 95% of our food must be barged and trucked in from Outside. It’s estimated that we have a 7-day supply of food in the state. Now that deliveries are getting back to a more normal schedule, it’s time to think about the implications. How can we Alaskans be more food secure and self-sufficient?

Here are some ideas.

  1. Support your local farmers. When you buy locally grown food, our farmers grow more of it, and we all benefit.
  2. Learn to preserve food when its abundant, whether by freezing, canning or pickling it. The UAF Cooperative Extension Service is a great resource.
  3. Keep a good supply of long-lasting staples on hand, such as rice, dried beans, powdered milk, canned goods.
  4. Grow your own garden. It will soon be time to start your seeds.
  5. Learn about where, when and how your food is grown and how it gets to you, so that you can make conscious, informed decisions about the things you buy.

Co-op Market exists, in part, to provide a viable marketplace for local agriculture, and we are doing that. Alaskans do love Alaskan products, and demand can quickly outstrip supply.

For example, we sell out of local eggs almost as soon as we get them. We would sell more if we could get more, but many small producers can’t afford to follow packaging regulations and other food safety rules. We need to find a way to build an agricultural infrastructure to make this easier and less expensive.

With the help of a USDA grant, we will soon begin work with UAF on a study to determine the feasibility of a mobile poultry processing facility. Such a facility would make it possible for us to sell local poultry at the co-op. Without a certified processor in Alaska, we currently cannot do this.

As a co-op, we believe that cooperation may hold the key to many of our food supply issues in Alaska. Local farmers could join together and create a cooperative kitchen certified for commercial use. Sharing the costs, farmers could create value-added goods, such as frozen fruits and vegetables. This would expand the market: We can’t buy and sell these goods unless they’re produced in a certified facility.

Seeing empty shelves in the stores was a shock to many of us. But it was also good for us. More Alaskans are aware of food security, and we’re talking about it. This is how change begins.

Filed Under: Food, Issues, News

GM’s Response to Ms Magazine Debate

March 22, 2014 By mary.christensen 8 Comments

At the heart of every cooperative is the desire to build common ground for member-owners and customers regardless of their backgrounds and beliefs. Co-op Market Grocery and Deli is no different. We welcome everyone.

It is also important to understand that as operators of a successful business we work to choose natural and organic products we think our customers will want to buy. We welcome comments and suggestions. Anyone can fill out a comment card at the customer service counter and we will consider these suggestions in our decision making. At the end of the day our board of directors has delegated operation to a management team focused on making good buying decisions to serve the needs of our member-owners. Sometimes people ask us to stop carrying products that other people want to buy. This makes decision making a little harder.

When faced with such dilemmas I believe that it is important to consider what is most important to our co-op and why did we set out to open this store to begin with? Probably our most important goal throughout the development years was improving the local economy. Another goal is providing our member-owners with the healthiest and freshest food possible. We also want to be both economically and financially sustainable. Finally, we care about our community.

We are proud of the work we are doing to create local economy, especially in our meat department. This week we are increasing the amount of local beef we buy and we’ve added local pork. Reindeer, goat and buffalo are regular offerings. All of our fish and seafood is wild caught in Alaskan waters. Our chicken is from our neighbors in Washington (since there are no poultry processing facilities in Alaska). Soon we’ll see more and more local produce. Last year local produce accounted for 35% of produce sales. This year we hope to increase that to 51%. Local eggs have just hit the shelves and we hope to offer more. (Call our fresh foods buyer, Steven Vandermaas, at 457-1023 Ext 104 if you have local eggs to sell.). We offer coffee from two local vendors – Diving Duck of Fairbanks and Kaladi Brothers of Anchorage. You’ll also find local ice cream and milk and many other local products in our aisles.

Possibly our most delicious local food comes right out of our own kitchen! Our talented chefs create amazing soups, salads and sandwiches using local meats and seafood and fresh organic vegetables. Many vegetarian and vegan options are available as well. Currently we are looking for a double soup warmer so that meat eaters and vegetarians can both find the soups they crave.

Perhaps our most important goal is sustainability. How do we provide our community with a financially sustainable community grocery store that thrives for years to come? This was the question I was working on when the debate over Ms magazine came to my attention. We have recently joined National Cooperative Grocer’s Association and a Development Advisor spent a week here helping me to assess how we need to improve operations. We’re excited about the opportunity NCGA offers us. Coming in June you will see Co+op Deals throughout the store. You might even get a coupon book or sales flyer in the mail. NCGA also helps us to offer education, recipes and information about natural foods.

Concern for community is another goal near and dear to us. Last fall we started the popular Lend a Hand program that gives you the opportunity to round up at the register and help your favorite charity. Our member-owners and customers donated over $1500 to both Stone Soup Cafe (Breadline) and the Foodbank.

As cooperators we do not represent one political agenda. When we offer reading material that we think people will want to buy that does not mean that the opinions represented in the magazine are ours. We strive to offer a balance of reading material that interests our customers. You will find food, farming and exercise magazines, literary magazines, and both the New Republic and Ms. While we welcome suggestions, our professional staff makes the buying decisions for our store. We will not be voting on what magazines (or other products) to carry but ultimately, for member-owners, the best way to vote is by buying the products you like.

Again, what matters most at our co-op? Local economy, healthy food, sustainability and community.

Thanks,
Mary Christensen
General Manager

Filed Under: Issues Tagged With: education, news stories, politics, principles

Local Food – a Wise Investment Toward Food Security

December 6, 2010 By mary.christensen 1 Comment

Interior Alaskans often picture themselves as self-reliant individuals, growing huge cabbages and putting a moose in the freezer each fall.  Growing produce in the long days of summer and gathering from the bounty of nature indeed can be productive, spiritually rewarding, and economical.  However, the reality is our population as a whole imports a high percentage of its food from outside the state.

With only an estimated 10-day supply of food in warehouses, Alaska is vulnerable to a prolonged disruption of the long-distance transportation network on which we rely daily.  Rising cost of fossil fuel will impact food production and transportation prices.  Relying heavily on outside sources means we are also at risk when one of the few major producers has contamination that can manifest widespread effects on many people, even if caught relatively quickly and recalled.

U.S. policies favoring inexpensive food after World War II included price supports for commodities (foods, fuels, and fiber crops, such as cotton) and low taxation on fossil fuel, which is also a feedstock for fertilizer and pesticides.  The cost of food as a percentage of annual income has steadily declined in the industrialized world during the 20th Century.  Today Americans spend only about 10% of income on food.  However, the “savings” come at a price to the environment (chemical loads, water use) with consequences to international policy on energy (including military engagement), immigrant labor, and trade—externalities that don’t show up on the label in a grocery store.

A local system of food production and processing for storage capability in Interior Alaska, if it (likely) does not qualify for price supports enjoyed by “industrial” agriculture Outside, would be more expensive to consumers because it would reflect more of the true costs. However, what is the value of not being so vulnerable to a disruption of transportation, such that shelves of major grocery stores begin to go bare when trucks or barges are delayed for just one day?  What is the return on your dollar spent when you can see it remain in the community, providing jobs for producers, processors, and grocers?  How much are you willing to pay for supporting a local food system has to be more accountable because it is composed of your neighbors, not a faceless entity thousands of miles distant with many corporate fingers taking a cut between the grower (doing the work and taking the greatest risk) and the supermarket?

The mantra of industrial process is increased efficiency, which indeed can help feed the world—if consumers can afford the shipping.  But heavily mechanized production means high start-up and operational costs for younger people with the urge and skills to produce food. To quality for many of the federal cost share programs you need to have the private money or loan collateral up front–a Catch 22 for young families.

Alaska is highly unlikely in our lifetimes to produce all the food needed by our growing population approaching ¾ of a million people across a vast area, some of which is unsuitable for agriculture or livestock. However, trials a hundred years ago at various locations across the state demonstrated a high potential for growing food on relatively small areas with intensive labor—something young aspiring farmers can handle. There are incredibly resourceful producers of crops and livestock in the Interior right now, growing for personal consumption and maybe a little at the farmer’s market or customer shares.  Our collective challenge is to help them scale it up!

I envision Fairbanks Community Cooperative Market as one venue that can help with food security by providing a reliable local outlet for many smaller producers.  We can still buy the more exotic foods from far away, but we can buy a lot more of the basics much closer to home.

Filed Under: Issues Tagged With: food security, local food production

Does Food Rule?

May 6, 2010 By mary.christensen Leave a Comment

A review of the new “quick read” by Michael Pollan, “Food Rules”

By Rich Seifert,  Co-op Market Board Member

I read Michael Pollan’s first book, the Botany of Desire many years ago, and now his stature as America’s food folk hero is perhaps at its peak.  He has followed an interesting road, and one we should all travel along these days.

His latest, “Food Rules”, is a very quick but effective read written in the pattern of “Life’s Little Lesson Books”. This format makes the book, dense as it is with inspirations, a very quick read.  It is perfectly designed for any aspiring “food missionaries” out there who want to promote healthy eating and move to a healthier diet.

And for those of us who want to see Alaska, and for me, Fairbanks, become healthier through healthy eating, the virtues of this little tome are as timely as they are helpful.

The plan for the book was to ask people, through a New York Times blog called “Well” (as in wellness) for their best advice in an aphorism on eating well and healthy.  Spinning onward from his previous book, In Defense of Food, he condenses the entire message of the book into these seven words:  Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Pretty comprehensive actually.  But in this little book he refines the message further into paragraphs of food insight, which I can best relate by showing examples of my own “favorites’” list.  Take these examples as a few seductive tastes to incite you to read the book:

–       Avoid food products that contain ingredients no ordinary person would keep in their pantry. For instance ethoxylated diglycerides, cellulose, xanthan gum.  Doesn’t seem too hard, does it?

–       Avoid food products that make health claims (!) Well this seems counter-intuitive at first, but upon reflection, makes great sense.  If a product has to tell you how healthy it is, then it is making up for some deficiency it obviously has.  Carrots don’t have to convince you that they are good for you.

–       Avoid foods you see advertised on television. Whoa, this is a biggie!  I have heard a friend describe commercials for pizza or Red Lobster restaurant as “food pornography”.  A fairly apt description of the visual effect of the commercials. It shouldn’t be necessary to say that the vegetable lobby doesn’t need to do TV ads.

–       Eat only foods that will eventually rot. Again, anything that will last indefinitely has so many preservatives and probably toxic ingredients that keep it from “spoiling” that it cannot be very good for living creatures such as we humans.   An exception is honey, which has an indefinite shelf life, but it is unique in that respect.  All food needs to be digestible, and if it can’t be digestible outside your body by other creatures who need it just as much, it is unlikely to be healthfully digested inside your body.

Since I am writing this for both the general public and particularly for the future patrons of our Fairbanks Community Cooperative Market (Co-op Market), I want to encourage the best food products for a healthy life, and make them available in Alaska, and preferably grown here too.

Michael Pollan’s  “Food Facts” is motivated by much the same things. He started out with a keen interest in finding out how to eat well to maintain his family’s health. He discloses two major facts in the preface that he has gleaned from this search, and he concisely summarizes what he has learned and written about since.

First, populations that eat mostly the “ Western” diet, consisting of lots of processed foods and meat, added fats and sugars, lots of refined grains, lots of everything except vegetables, invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases:  obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.  Virtually all of the obesity and the diabetes, 80% of the cardiovascular disease, and more than a third of all cancers can be linked to this diet.

And second, in contrast, populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases.  It appears that we human omnivores are well adapted to a broad range of mixed traditional diets, except for one: the WESTERN DIET, recently fallen upon us.

There is a third factor though which is good news, and which I hope that our new co-op will help to promote:  People who get off the Western diet see dramatic improvements in their health.  Pollan cites research that suggests that the effects of the Western diet can be rolled back by getting off it, and relatively quickly.

It is our intent with the Co-op Market to help in every way to achieve this option and promote community health and wellness. We even have a committee devoted to those very subjects. (The next meeting of the Health and Wellness committee is Tuesday, June 1 at 5:30 pm at the Volunteer Center.)

Stay with us, be patient, and start developing these suggested eating habits now. As soon as we can, the Co-op Market will do all it can to keep you eating healthy and maintaining local food availability.  Join the Co-op Market, become a full voting member, and eat well.  Live long and prosper…  and come and visit us online at www.FairbanksCoop.org/

Filed Under: Food, Issues, Member education Tagged With: books, education, food systems, health

Talk by David Fazzino and Phil Loring on Alaska food systems

December 9, 2009 By coopmarket Leave a Comment

This event, part of the Anthropology Colloquium Series, may be of interest to FCCM members:

Anchorage? Uh, Washington? Anyone? We Have a Problem! Disaster Politics and Cumulative Effects in Alaskan Food Systems
David Fazzino and Phil Loring, Department of Anthropology, UAF
Friday, Dec. 11
3:30 p.m. – Schaible Auditorium, Bunnell Building, UAF
****
Information: pplattet@alaska.edu

Filed Under: Events, Food, Issues, Member education Tagged With: education, food systems, local food production, rural Alaska, sustainability

Community sustainability meeting

November 3, 2009 By coopmarket Leave a Comment

Suzy Fenner of SCANFairbanks and Mike & Ritchie Musick are holding a meeting on community sustainability:

November 4th, 6:00 – 8:00 pm Wednesday evening at the Noel Library Auditorium

There will be a presentation by Ritchie and Mike Musick on The Natural Step for Communities, discussion afterwards, and a second presentation and discussion at 7:00 pm on food security and sustainable agriculture.

Contact: Suzy Fenner, SCANFairbanks
(Sustainable Community Action Network for Fairbanks — advocating for economic, environmental, and social sustainability) (907) 479-2345, polarsolar@gmail.com

Filed Under: Events, Food, Issues Tagged With: community, sustainability

Essay on Sustainable Agriculture

October 30, 2009 By mary.christensen 3 Comments

for SARE New Voices Contest
December, 2007

I didn’t grow up on a farm.  When I was young, I never learned how to fix a screen door let alone a tractor.   I didn’t know which end of a seed to plant in the ground.  If you had told me twenty years ago that I would own the farthest north certified organic farm in the country, I would have told you that you must be crazy.

I come from a long line of Jewish tailors who never ventured too far from the city.  My connections with agriculture were like many kids growing up in suburban America – with the pictures of fields of grain on cereal boxes or occasional trips to the “country” to visit an apple orchard or to see goats and rabbits at a petting zoo.   But my parents always had a garden we always liked to eat and we liked to eat good fresh food.  This is how I came to agriculture – through gardening.  Through getting back to that connection with where your food comes from and acting on it.  I wanted that feeling of looking down a row of crops and feeling that connection with the plants and soil and the thousands of years of farmers and gardeners before me – food growers.

It took me a while to get into farming.  It didn’t come until my mid-thirties, when after many years of having a garden, I quit my day job and followed the dream of many back-to-the land folks before me. I had no idea of what I was doing, but I expanded the garden, bought a rototiller and Elliot Coleman’s “The New Organic Grower”, and started to make a go of it as a market farmer.  It certainly hasn’t been easy, especially since we live in interior Alaska square in the middle of agricultural zone 1.  There is very little historical farmland where we live.  Our farm was literally carved out of the Alaska wilderness with a chainsaw and bulldozer – hardly a soft footprint on the land.  But we justified the destruction of 10 acres of our forest with the belief that having a farm and feeding people was, in the end, a good thing for the community.  After all, wasn’t that what all farmers had originally done?  Also by farming organically, we hoped we were insuring a healthy environment for any wildlife that used the farm, for ourselves and our workers, and for those who ate our produce.  The demand for quality local produce is high, and despite our growing pains as a farm, we are still able to stay afloat with a lot of hard work, and all of our savings.  After 10 years, we have a healthy farm and an increasingly successful business.

Since I come from this new movement of market gardeners turned farmer, my models for success and role models to seek advice from have been organic farmers many with similar experience as I but with more years under their belt.  We have learned the appropriate models for ecologically sound agriculture and the goals for our farm are the same as the goals for many farms like ours across the country – to minimize off-farm inputs while maintaining high soil fertility, to produce high quality and healthy produce, and maintain a profitable business.

We think about sustainability a lot in Alaska, however most of the discussion focuses on natural fish and wildlife populations and their relation to subsistence versus commercial harvest.  There is little talk about sustainable agriculture, but there should be.  Although one’s vision of Alaska might be one of a hunter alone on the tundra, we get most of our food like the rest of America – from large supermarkets run by huge corporations.  If the average piece of food travels approximately 1500 miles from producer to consumer in the rest of the country, it travels much farther to us in Alaska.  For this reason, and many others, we should be concerned about sustainability on a local and community scale.

If our state seems extreme, it is but a microcosm of the country as a whole.  We need to look within our own communities for inputs to agriculture and other resources.  Our model for farming does follow a community approach.  Eating locally is not just a buzzword for marketing – although that is very effective – but it also should be the way we do business.  “Thinking globally and acting locally” is not only the right thing to do for the earth, it is the only economical thing to do.  With the cost of fuel rising ever higher coupled with high shipping costs, we have to think very carefully what it is we import.  Looking at ways to improve the soil, create energy, and market crops must be local in order for us to make a living and feel as though we’re living our lives for the betterment of our community.

Small-scale and locally marketed agriculture should not be just a fringe or niche economy. By showing that we can make a living while growing healthy crops by ecologically sound methods we will make ourselves assets in our local economies by encouraging both new farmers and intelligent agriculture.   It will continue to cost more for food, but we cannot keep going down the path of large scale commodity agriculture transported huge distances or we will be paying a higher and higher price for the wrong reasons.

I can now fix a screen door, sometimes fix my tractor and plant seeds right side up.  If the son of a long line of Jewish tailors can carve out a niche in small scale agriculture, then I’m optimistic that this growing movement of community-centered agriculture can keep gaining momentum.  We need to invest in community agriculture – it is at the core of sustainability.

Mike Emers
Rosie Creek Farm
Ester, Alaska

Filed Under: Issues, Member education Tagged With: community, education, local food production, news stories, sustainability

Your Food Co-op – A Survey

June 28, 2009 By mary.christensen 3 Comments

As a member you are a part owner of FCCM.

Volunteers already working toward the goal of opening our food co-op want to know what you think.

Please take the time to answer these questions:

_____________________________________________

What do you want to see your food co-op look like?

What kinds of products do you want to see or discourage?

How big of a store will fit your needs?

What departments do you think are important?

What kind of community involvement and events would you like to see happen?

E-mail us your thoughts, desires, big dreams of the kind of grocery store you would like to see and any other ideas you may have at fccm2010@gmail.com

Filed Under: Issues Tagged With: poll, product selection, store design

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