Not ‘Just Local Food’
Cooperative combines traditional values with eat local movement
By Adrian Northrup northram@uwec.edu
There’s a food movement going on across the country and a small store in Eau Claire, Wis. is at the head of it. Just Local Food, 772 First Ave., is one of the first stores in the country combining the concepts of eating locally and a food cooperative, offering locally produced and distributed products to people in the area. This store is just the beginning, co-owner Aaron Ellringer said. “We know that future is in local food,” he said. “We’re banking on the fact that people are going to be turning to local farmers to provide them with their food.
The founders of Just Local Food came up with the concept for the business when they decided they wanted to work with local farmers to help sell their produce and products and also wanted to own their own business, Ellringer said. Once the concept of combining local food and a co-op was chosen, the founders had to decide what kind of company they wanted to be. They settled on a worker-owned food cooperative. Just Local Food opened as a delivery service in 2004, and opened a store in 2005.
The cooperative structure gives Just Local Food flexibility, Ellringer said. Being a cooperative allows the company to focus on selling local food rather than money.
“Corporations by law are required to make money and all their decisions have to be about making money,” Ellringer said. “…we’re allowed in our bylaws and through the state statutes to consider things other than just making money. To me, it’s an important thing to be able to support and work for our community.”
Just Local food is a local expression of a growing national wide emphasis on local food, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire associate professor of geography Paul Kaldjian said. However, the idea of eating local isn’t new. “This is a return to kinds of things that happened a long time ago,” he said.
While its business structure is a cooperative, Just Local food is very unique. The worker-owned structure, where the employees own and operate the business without an external board of directors is a different structure than most co-ops. The company was also started recently, rather than during the 1970s like many food co-ops, Ellringer said, giving the business a different perspective. And other co-ops don’t have the main focus on local food like Just Local Food. “Our co-op started recently asking new questions and trying to solve new problems that exist today,” Ellringer said. “… We have the name food and we have the name co-op. And that’s about where the similarity ends.”
Just Local Food is approaching local food from both ends, Ellringer said. Not only are they supplying the food, they are also increasing the demand by educating people about it. Other differences between Just Local Food and a regular co-op is membership fees, Ellringer said. Many co-ops require shoppers to become members of the business or pay a fee to shop there. For Just Local Food there is no membership or fee. Ellringer said he doesn’t like to classify Just Local Food as just a food co-op, but a rather a small-town grocery. “I call it a mom and pop grocery store,” Ellringer said. “Because it gives you the impression that it’s small, you’ll know the people that are there.
Patron Dennis Eikenberry said knowing the people there is one reason he shops there. “I love all the people that work there,” he said. “We know one another on a personal basis. It’s a place where like minded people meet. I’m always running into people there that I’ve never met before and we end up having these long involved conversations. I meet new friends at Just Local Food.”
Just Local Food works with about 50 to 75 local producers. Ellringer said it takes a lot of time and organization working with so many suppliers, and sometimes costs more financially, but it has many great benefits, including supporting local farmers and the economy. “You’re able to recycle money through our local economy time and time again,” he said. About 85 percent of products sold in the store are locally or regionally produced.
Working with so many local producers, Kaldjian said stores like Just Local Food operate similar to a farmer’s market but has a few advantages. First, it makes the products available every day of the week. The business also has the ability to get products from a larger area, and offer a wider variety of products. The store is also able to have more products in stock, he said. Another benefit is stores have the ability to advertise.
Just Local Food has a food policy that determines the types of products they carry. The first policy is that the item is locally produced or distributed. The second is that the product is sustainably grown and or organic. The third policy is that product is of high quality and low cost. Other policies include the products being unprocessed and unmodified, produced or distributed by small businesses or cooperatives, packaged and produced in an environmentally-friendly manner and no exploitation of workers involved with the food. The food policy also bans genetically modified good, partially hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrup items from the store, unless they are specifically labeled.
While Just Local Food tries to follow these guidelines, Ellringer said they do make exceptions, for the benefit of their customers.
“We make compromises on the edges in order to keep more customers happy and keep them coming in and shopping.
Trish Cummins, who was a customer on Just Local Food’s first delivery route and now shops at the store twice a week, said she has watched the store evolve.
“They’ve definitely expanded into being somewhere you can do all of your shopping,” she said. “… There’s not a grocery store in town that can rival the organic and local produce they get.
Food problems, like the increasing number of unknown ingredients in foods like pesticides and growth hormones, and contaminations, intimidate people and get them interested in where their food comes from, Kaldjian said. “As the list of the ingredients gets longer and more chemical, the more people feel uncomfortable,” Kaldjian said. “…Local foods also benefit from this. It’s the desire to understand what we really are eating and what we’re feeding our kids.” Food contamination outbreaks have increased sales at Just Local Food, Ellringer said. Customers sometimes come in for a certain ingredient and then get interested in the idea of local food, he said.
Ellringer said they also sometimes use exceptions to their food policy to test products for local farmers. For example, Ellringer said that if a farmer was interested in making chicken hot dogs, but wasn’t sure if they would be popular, Just Local Food may find chicken hot dogs from another nearby vendor to test the market.
“If we find out that customers are buying them up like crazy and they’re spending this much money on them,” Ellringer said. “We can share that information with our local farmers and hopefully develop a product that can sell.
Local products may cost more, but Eikenberry and Cummins said they are willing to pay more for local products. And if more people bought the products, Cummins said, prices would decrease.
“The more people who can afford to shop this way (locally), the more people that do, the prices will start to come down,” she said.
Cummins said her family shops at Just Local Food to reduce their environmental impact. Buying food that has to be transported to the area causes damage to the environment and uses unnecessary food miles, she said.
Food miles are the distance between the place of production and consumption of food, Kaldjian said. The more miles the food travels, the more energy is used and the larger impact on the environment.
Buying locally also supports the local economy, Kaldjian said, and keeps revenue in the area. Buying locally isn’t a new concept. Kaldjian compared it to buying American and supporting the U.S. economy, and the idea of buying Wisconsin cheese.
While it is difficult to do with working with so many local vendors, Just Local Food is generating revenue, and that revenue is increasing every year, Ellringer said. In 2007, the company sold over $350,000. Most of the best sellers in the store are local products like dairy, beef and vegetables, Ellringer said.
Ellringer said he thinks the idea of local food is and will take off across the country. He receives phone calls from people across the country curious about Just Local Food, and how the business works. While the exact model may not work, Ellringer said there are parts of Just Local Food that can be replicated. “There are farmers and consumers and workers out there that want to figure out this puzzle,” he said. “How do we create a food system for local food? We’ve done it. So people want to see that and how we’ve done it.”
