Grocery Update Volume 2, #13: Cooperative and Resilient, As Stubborn As The Hills.

Also: Why MAHA Is A Smokescreen. And Some Good News!

Discontents: 1. Some Good News. 2. Why MAHA Is A Smokescreen. 3. Cooperative Resilience In The Hills Of Wisconsin.

1. Some Good News: UFCW Win and Farmworkers Freed!

New UFCW 770 Contract Win:

ufcw770

A post shared by @ufcw770

UFCW 770 on Instagram: "45,000 grocery workers all across Southern California officially have a brand new contract. Vons member Paszion Horner-Smith, who served on the bargaining team, spoke with reporter Macy Jenkins. “I’m excited we have this contract. My fear was that the employers weren’t going to take us seriously, weren’t gonna give us what we were asking for and try to take away. “We were fighting for better health care, wages, and staffing, and we got all three of those things. “It [the wage increase] makes it more a livable wage to afford things, basically afford the places that we actually work at. What’s going to happen is you’re going to see a smile more and a lot more happy faces. “The new contract is a win for customers too. Paszion says that the new staffing language they’ve included makes it so that more staff will be available in the store meaning it will cut down on the wait times for all customers in the stores.”

Vermont Farmworkers Heidi and Nacho Have Won Their Freedom!

Heidi and Nacho have won their freedom and will soon be released, after nearly a month behind bars. The two Migrant Justice leaders received hearings in immigration court today, resulting in a judge granting them bond and ordering their release.

On June 14th, Nacho and stepdaughter Heidi were delivering food to farmworkers in Franklin County, VT when they were pulled over without cause by officials from the U.S. Border Patrol. Agents smashed their car window and violently detained the two community leaders.

Represented by the Center for Justice Reform at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, and the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, Nacho and Heidi challenged the constitutionality of their detention in federal court while simultaneously contesting their removal in immigration court. After a federal judge delayed a decision to release them earlier this week, the two filed bond motions in immigration court, leading to today’s rulings.

This result would not have been possible without the hundreds who took action at protests across Vermont denouncing the detentions and the thousands who sent messages to ICE demanding their release. Rossy Alfaro, mother to Heidi, partner to Nacho, and leader in Migrant Justice celebrated the outcome:

“Today, we showed that our unity makes us strong. We won't be defeated. And every day, the Migrant Justice community grows even stronger. Together, we will continue to fight to ensure that injustices like the one my family is suffering from won't happen to others. We won't allow our families to be separated."

Bond has been paid with the support of the Vermont Freedom Fund and the two are expected to be released to family and community supporters shortly.

Please make a donation to the Vermont Freedom Fund to ensure they have the funds to keep bailing people out!

2. Why “Making America Healthy Again” Is A Smokescreen.

By Heather Terry, CEO of GoodSam Foods.

As a CEO working at the intersection of food, agriculture, and impact, I feel a responsibility to speak plainly:

The rhetoric behind “making America healthy again” is a smokescreen—a distraction from policies that are actively harming our land, our farmers, and our health.

And let’s be clear: this is not about party lines. This is about reality.

Here’s what’s really happening:

Over 70% of U.S. agricultural labor is performed by undocumented immigrants—many working in unsafe conditions, for low wages, so we can have cheap food. Without them, our American food system doesn’t function. Yet we’re watching ICE raids on farms instead of building humane, strategic solutions. Want to know what else is disappearing with those workers? Your affordable groceries. This is the dark reality of our food system.

Public and protected lands—forests, wetlands, and carbon sinks—are being sold off or opened to drilling and development.
You CAN NOT support regenerative agriculture while simultaneously stripping the ecosystems it relies on. That’s not policy. That’s propaganda.

The EPA is gutting protections on clean water, air, and pesticide use.
Chemicals like glyphosate (a known carcinogen) are still widely used and showing up in our water, food, and even rainfall—while Big Ag profits and small farms suffer.

Food is global.
Tariffs on food imports aren’t just geopolitical posturing—they’re an indirect tax on every American household. The U.S. depends on global trade to stock grocery shelves. Short-sighted trade policy = higher prices, fewer options, and more strain on working families.

Meanwhile…
Big Ag and chemical companies thrive—not by feeding us well, but by feeding us cheaply and addictively.

And lobbyists keep winning, again and again.

What’s most disappointing?
Some of my own colleagues in the natural products industry—people who have spent decades challenging the system—are now embracing this movement without question. Where’s the critical thinking we’ve demanded of each other for so long?

Let’s get real: Food is complex. And those of us who work deeply within it—farmers, impact brands, indigenous communities—deserve a seat at the table.

Not slogans. Not soundbites. A real plan.

MAHA is not about health. It’s not about prosperity. It’s about power. And it’s fooling people who should know better. If we want a truly healthy, regenerative future, we need new leadership, smarter policy, and a new kind of patriotism—one rooted in stewardship, equity, and truth.

Until then, MAHA is just a campaign slogan. And America stays sick.

3. Cooperation and Resilience In The Hills Of Wisconsin.

I have only been to (or through) Wisconsin a few times. Each visit stuck in my mind, mostly quite positive. Sometime in my early 20’s, when gas was under a buck a gallon, I passed through the state on a cross country trip, coming back from the West Coast. After days driving through big sky country, jagged mountains and endless, rolling American steppe, I was taken aback by the sudden green canopies of the north woods, the vast broad leaf, mixed hardwood forests that reminded me of being home in the northeast.

The next trip was decades later, on a Whole Foods team build in Spring Green sometime in the early 2010s. I was selected to participate in the company’s latest touchy-feely group indoctrination process to get in touch with my inner self-worth or higher purpose or whatever half-baked new age crap they were peddling in place of competitive salaries and actual career development, paid for in full while the stock price was riding high post-Great Recession but pre-Amazon buyout. Spring Green was gorgeous and I swore I would come back.

2013ish.

I did come back to the Badger State sometime afterwards for an Organic Valley annual meeting in LaCross. Small downtown, lots of bars, very lively, like if upstate New York hadn’t been gutted and hollowed out by decades of neoliberal globalization and offshoring.

In my Whole Foods role, I loved working with the OV folks. They were my second largest supplier at the time, a nearly one billion dollar a year organic, farmer-owned cooperative based in the Driftless region of Western Wisconsin, an ancient, geologically unique, resilient and stubborn formation of dense, rolling sandstone hills that had somehow stood firm against the glaciers, so there were no glacial “drifts” or deposits of rock and sediment from elsewhere left behind after the glaciers melted.

The Driftless gave rise to a unique farming culture too, as the glaciers had never scraped the hills bare in similar latitudes, like they did in Vermont and Maine. And so the farmers farmed the flat plateaus and hilltops, while the valleys sloped densely wooded with fast running creeks. The farms to this day are still small to medium scale, not nearly big enough to support the heavily mechanized, chemical intensive agriculture of the Great Plains mega region all around the Driftless, the literally hundreds of millions of acres of genetically modified (GMO) corn, soy and alfalfa doused with a special sauce of glyphosate, dicamba and diquat to suppress weeds, all to grow ethanol or make feed for the expansive pork, chicken and beef colonies of Iowa, Nebraska and the Dakotas, so we can all have cheap meat, or at least we used to have cheap meat until Covid-19 and the profit-driven price increases borne of intense market concentration and increasingly exploitative relationships with workers, communities and farmers drove meat prices up 40-50%, so no we have expensive meat, raised on the grain monocultures of the midwest

The Driftless, this hidden, out of the way area of the upper Midwest boasts some of the highest density of organic and sustainable farming in the Western Hemisphere, stubborn and resilient like the hills, in large part due to the efforts of Organic Valley cooperative farmers, their community, their marketing teams and retail customers and their likewise committed and stubborn end consumers demanding be food made with less poison and more love, more resilience too.

My national purchasing team at Whole Foods at the time was nearly 10% of OV’s annual revenue, so I felt some responsibility to meet their producers, show my face and understand them better. The decisions we made on spreadsheets and conference calls had huge real life consequences for these farmers, their employees, their livestock, their families and their communities.

The past few years had been rough for OV and our organic milk supply, as the pendulum swung between out of stocks and oversupply every eighteen or so months as we all tried to keep up with changing consumer preferences and competitive market dynamics, larger retailers launching organic private labels, customers drinking less milk and more plant-based dairy analogues, but eating more real cheese, and everybody wanting more cow butter.

Milk is a brutal sector. Cows are living, sentient creatures and once they start milking, they don’t stop for a long time. Few in the industry can ever forecasts production and consumption accurately, especially in the absence of any government mandated price parity, production quotas or supply management. The federal milk rule is absurd, keeping prices low and incentivizing overproduction, farmers risking everything and underpaying themselves and their (mostly) migrant staff, all just to stay on the land and live some pastoral ideal that is more often than not subsidized by off-farm jobs. The free market at work.

But Organic Valley (OV) is a modern economic miracle. The co-op defies easy classification within the context of late capitalism, a farmer-owned behemoth based in rural communities, making food that appeals to mostly urban/suburban, well-educated and middle to upper income, health conscious consumers, all dependent on for profit retailers and wholesalers to bridge that relationship.

While they are mostly known for their milks and cheeses, they also produce meat and a variety of produce. The brand name of Organic Valley is also the marketing arm of the co-op, it is their job to sell what their farmers grow. They also have a logistics side hustle that is around 10% of their revenue, to make all that milk and cheese trucking cost efficient through backhauls and contract hauling, but that is another story.

OV is an iconic brand, it is sold pretty much everywhere. And they were usually an extremely high maintenance headache for my team to deal with, especially when retail demand was not in sync with their production, either seasonally, or as new food trends like ketogenic, paleo or Whole30 started emphasizing more high fat, high protein dairy products.

Remember folks, when butter and whole milk sales are up, that means you are going to see a lot more whey protein energy bars, “muscle” milks and snack foods to help balance out all that fluid milk capacity. Forecasting and balancing, along with those criminally low pay prices that incentivize overproduction, the trade secrets as to why milk byproducts are in literally everything. Organic and cooperative producers have tried to correct this dynamic with higher farmer pay prices and some level of supply management, but it is an imperfect system when they still depend on retailers and their fickle business cycles to make sure their inventory makes it to consumers.

Hence, why I, who at the time was responsible for nearly $5 billion in product sales across 400 or so stores, was at an annual farmers meeting.

It was a hoot, I met Wendell Berry, although I was never a huge fan. I always liked Wes Jackson better. And I realized that the co-op built their producer pools equally between Mennonite and Amish communities, Midwestern Scandinavian, Italian and Scotch-Irish farming families, and lots of counter-cultural, back to the land’er types, so the crowd was a fun mix of tie-dye, denim overalls, grey dredlocks, white starched shirts, black slacks and lots of beards. So many beards.

It was a good time and helped me remember why I was in the business. Another great visit to the Badger State.

2025.

In June of this year, on a chemo break, we took a short trip back to the Driftless. We went hiking, canoeing, ate really good, fresh food and of course, visited lots of local stores. Grocery nerds always be grocery nerding. But the one that stuck with me the most was a food co-op in out-of the-way Viroqua, Wisconsin, in the heart of the Driftless region.

Viroqua is surrounded by those small and mid-sized farms, many organic and sporting signage of Organic Valley, or other producer co-ops like Westby, founded by local Norwegian families. In between those rolling fields are wooded hills and valleys that hide even more small farms, usually vegetable or grain producers along the fast moving creeks. The highways were crowded with Mennonite families living their lives, always giving a wave when you’d pass them on the roads. Viroqua itself is tiny but lively, new housing going up alongside the IGA, the dollar stores, cafes, bars, and the artsy tourist magnet stores always found in small tourist destination rural towns, whether Fredericksburg or Cape Ann or Viroqua.

Viroqua is also odd in that it supports a grocery co-op without the presence of a college or university. Co-ops tend to follow alongside higher education and the progressive attitudes that students and professors have towards food production, business ownership and participatory democracy. But not Viroqua. Just a co-op, no college, in a town with enough critical mass of producers and consumers to make it one of the more interesting operators, up the street from dollars stores. A rural, working and middle class counterculture. Now that is unique.

The co-op is not huge, but it is not small either. It feels like the right size for what it is doing, especially after a remodel a few years back that added additional space. It is branded as a “Co+op” too, the bright evergreen signage indicating participation in the National Cooperative Grocers’ (NCG) purchasing and operations services that support over 200 other cooperatives nationwide.

Grocery co-operatives tend to be consumer or community owned. There are a few worker-owned shops, where the staff holds shares in common, different from bigger employee-owned ESOPs like HyVee or Redner’s, where staff own shares akin to a retirement fund. Consumer cooperatives mean shares, or the actual capital, is held by shoppers who live locally. Co-ops are not corporate capitalists like Walmart and Amazon or massive privately held enterprises like many of the big regional grocers like HEB, Wegman’s, Raley’s or Market Basket. Nor are they public, state-owned enterprises like Norway or Mexico’s oil producers, or public utilities. Co-ops are co-ops, they are their own thing, and they can be as socialist or capitalist as their staff, community members and the broader economic pressures demand of them.

Many countries support massive cooperative grocery networks, especially where labor parties, social democracy, or just less rapacious capitalism is more mainstream, or hasn’t been hounded out of existence by extreme market concentration or U.S. sponsored psy-ops or counterinsurgency.

As I documented in Forbes last year:

Internationally, the consumer cooperative sector holds significant grocery market share in many countries. There are over 4000 such stores in the U.K., with several networks boasting a combined 4 million members and 6.6% market share, and among the top 10 grocers. In the Netherlands, there are 550 cooperative stores with 10% market share, including Walmart-style hypermarkets, corner stores and discounters. Cooperatives dominate Switzerland, with over 2500 stores, Italy with over 1600 stores, and France, with over 1600 stores. Scandinavia is particularly cooperative focused. Norway has 1300 stores at #1 in market share, while Sweden has 760 stores with 36% market share. Denmark has 770 stores at #2 in market share. Finland is a grocery cooperative mecca. S Market is #1 at 46% market share, with 2.4 million members and “an economy based on mutuality”. The Denmark based Co-op Trading is a larger Scandinavian version of NCG. Co-op Trading supports 4500 stores and 13 million members with multiple brands of private label as well as crucial retail services. In Japan, over 312 consumer cooperatives and 30 million members belong to JCCU, which likewise provides store brands, retail services and policy advocacy for member stores.

In Viroqua, there is just one. Upper midwestern states like Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota boast dozens of such co-ops that support thousands of jobs, including some networks that are big enough to own their warehouse. Besides Seattle, where PCC is the largest consumer cooperative grocer in the U.S, the Midwest is the co-op mecca. Even here in the Driftless.

The store opens into a freshly stocked produce section, heavily adorned with local producer signage, the signage aligning well with actual products being sold in the coolers below, like the posters of the cute young couple from Keewaydin Farms, their organic watercress bunches being sold for $3.69, and their Hakuri turnips for $2.99, each being some of the tastiest, most nutrient dense vegetables you can eat under the sun. Eat more turnips. Or Levi Miller’s root vegetables, massive organic sweet potatoes and hairy, intimidatingly crimson beets. Or big bags of red potatoes from Driftless Organics, which I had to buy for my daughter, who is like me, a potato connoisseur. We all have our vices. Mine starts with deep fried tubers.

The local, organic vibes continued across the store. Organic whole wheat bread flour $14.99 for a 5lb bag, not cheap, as well as dried organic beans from Meadowlark Community Mill, the craft bags adorned with soaring birds, leaves of the indigenous trillium herbs found throughout the neighboring hills, and stylized millstones.

Co-ops in general over-index on local and organic products as a percentage of store sales, with an average of 24% of sales locally produced, well beyond anyone else in retail, and nearly 40% organic, on par with Whole Foods and ten times that of conventional grocers. Viroqua seemed to index even higher.

The co-op also took advantage of NCG’s national purchasing programs. NCG not only negotiates a wholesale cost-plus mark-up for all co-ops competitive with what Whole Foods or Sprouts receives from their distributors, but they also wrangle hundreds of brands to produce thousands of sale promotions called Co-op Deals, over 2600 a week, as well as deep discounts on private label products and bulk items called Co-op Basics. These price conscious programs have helped keep many co-ops in the black over the past years and contributed to positive comparative sales growth.

The Co-op Deals and Co-op Basics signs were all over the Viroqua store, highlighting the UNFI Field Day line that serves as the bargain basement competition to 365, KeHe’s Cadia, Kroger’s Simple Truth or Safeway Organics store brands. UNFI has had its moments lately, but co-ops use the scale and purchasing power of this $30 billion a year wholesaler to make sure they have some of the same every day, bargain tier products that would otherwise mean hemorrhaging customers to other retailers who specialize in such value merchandising.

The value communication continues around the store with hundreds of Co-op Deals signs, including the ubiquitous Annie’s Mac and Cheese at 2/$3. National brands such as Flowers Foods’ Simple Mills, Campbell’s Pacific Foods, Mary’s Gone Crackers and Back To Nature, Hormel’s Justin’s Nut Butters and Lactalis’ Stonyfield Farms are each regularly on sale and in stock at most co-ops, pending UNFI avoiding further catastrophic cybersecurity breaches.

Co-ops also over-index on fair trade goods and products made via a variety of fair labor standards. Co-ops heavily feature Equal Exchange bananas, nuts, coffee and chocolates, as well as a variety of other fair labor chocolate bars from Theo, Alter Eco, Divine, Magic (fka Dr.Bronners), Beyond Good, Tony’s, Endangered Species and others.

Like my team at Whole Foods, who spent years developing such a fair trade assortment from 2010-2015, grocery co-ops have done a lot of work to distinguish this particular product mix from the typical Hershey’s/Callebault or Mondelenz/Ferrero/Lindt mass market chocolate sets found nearly everywhere else. It is no wonder that the top 3 chocolate makers control over 60% of sales, and that child labor and forced labor are still rampant in West Africa because the industry siphons hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth annually from African farmers to Global North investors and executives and greenwashes it with philanthropy and public relations. But at least not as much at co-ops. There stuff is more expensive, but it is more honest, and less likely to be rooted in the structurally extractive economies with historical roots in the slave trade and colonialism. Viroqua has a full endcap of such goodies.

Co-op’s have also tried to create their own cooperative ecosystem between producers and retailers. This especially makes sense in a rural, isolated, working class, counter cultural community. The store has a range of signs shouting out other cooperative producers, such as Frontier spices, La Riojana olive oils and local Westby organic cottage cheeses and other dairy products, as this is, of course, Wisconsin. Nearly 5% of store sales across all NCG members clock in as other cooperatives, five times that of conventional grocery. It’s not a lot, but in a food system heavily consolidated at all levels of production by a handful of multinational conglomerates, any such progress is significant. And stubbornly achieved.

The staff was enthusiastic and helpful when I checked out with my cart full of goods. Co-ops are typically employment destinations for queer, non-binary and generally non-conforming folks, tattooed, pierced, punk rock, dyed hair, the employment culture and customer base usually more accepting of individuality and self-expression and not enforcing strict policies on appearance and apparel. No starched shirts and ties a la Market Basket, no red and beige an ala Target. The vibe was casual, even celebratory. The cashier was very interested in the turnips and pickles I bought and gave me some recommendations on local hiking, but admitted they were more of a home body and their hiking knowledge was purely secondhand.

Co-ops are not perfect when it comes to labor relations. They still exist in capitalism and are not immune to the contradictions of profit seeking and struggles for fair pay. Most co-ops face competitive pressures on prices and wages, and many hire managers with negative preconceptions or experiences regarding unions. The Abundance Food Co-op in Rochester, New York just unionized and some co-ops, like PCC in Seattle, have been unionized for decades, even if it wasn’t always smooth. PCC even placed two rank and file union members as worker representatives on their Board of Directors, a common practice in Europe but quite unique in the U.S.

Viroqua Co-op seemed like a decent place to work, in my brief visits. I hope it is at least. It ain’t easy to do the right thing these days. But it pays off in the long run, with the loyalty and dedication of consumers, retention and enthusiasm of employees and overall good vibes. Co-ops are a long game.

Just like the hills and valleys of the Driftless, or farmers trying to make a living while building a better food system from the ground up, a grocery co-op has to be stubborn and resilient. A food economy that bucks the norms of the Great Plains and vast heartland of the U.S., no doubt still a part of the globalized economy, but not as dependent on the extractive, chemical intensive GMO crop production responsible for both the majority of our calories and incalculable damages to ecosystems, communities and livelihoods.

Instead, an attempt to build a more fair, sustainable and wholesome enterprise model, deep in the belly of the beast, leveraging significant scale while protecting individuality and autonomy, a variation on the local farmer-owned cooperatives that form the economic, social and cultural foundations of this quiet, rural community, a modern economic miracle. See, I knew Wisconsin was cool.

peace.

(Viewpoints are our own and do not reflect our sponsors.)