The Oklahoma Food Cooperative

Perhaps the biggest key to the Cooperative’s success, says Bob, has been the enormous consumer interest in local food. That base drives the demand for local products. The cooperative has also responded in a number of smart ways to this demand. The website is easy and fun to navigate. It has mobilized and motivated hundreds of volunteers. It has organized producers and consumers over a wide region effectively. This reflects unusually good leadership, though Bob claims he’s not much of a businessperson.

“Most aspects have worked really well,” reflects Bob, yet he recognizes that the Oklahoma Food Cooperative is a work in progress. Some examples:

• Low income customers: “One of the failures is we haven’t been able to accept food stamps. We’ve written letters and met with senators. But federal legislation doesn’t have a category that fits what we’re doing. What we’d have to do to qualify is to open a brick and mortar store and have it open three days a week for eight hours a day with a certain specified amount of product. We may do this with our existing warehouse space, but the real goal is to allow food stamp customers access to all our products.”
  
  
• Lack of staff: The co-op has gotten remarkably far on volunteer labor, and more recently a few part-time staff, but Bob realizes this is unsustainable. “At the beginning, you need a few people who can invest a lot of sweat equity above the call of duty. But eventually we need some full-time people.”
  
  
• Quality assurance: Quality assurance thus far has been based on trust and the rotating inspections of a Producer Care Committee. The only complaint to date involved a pork producer who was suspected of surreptitiously buying his meat from a third party. The Disciplinary and Operations Committee formally launched an investigation, and the farmer decided to drop out of the co-op.
  
  
• Governance: Initially,the co-op had a hands-on board that discussed operational issues at every meeting. This made decision making difficult. Now there’s a separate operations committee, and a floor manager who reports to the committee.
  
  
• Accounting: The original books were a mess, and a board treasurer invested “tons of hours” to clean them up. “If you’re going to spend money, the very first thing you do should be to ask for accounting help, unless you can get a volunteer accountant. Budget for a real accountant. A member can do payment posting, but you need adequate financial statements to know if your organization is gaining or losing.”
  
  
• Competition: “The issue comes up about restricting certain number of producers in a product category. But the customers overruled this. If we turn an application down, it’s a standards issue, not an amount issue. We have kind of a free market. No one producer has enough product to satisfy everyone. It also keeps producers on their toes.”
  

That the Oklahoma Food Cooperative is replicable seems indisputable given the expanding number of imitators. Bob and the board are very conscious of this, and the Cooperative has sought to build features into its model that will make it easier to replicate, such as developing open- source software and providing in-person trainings.

But the jury is still out on whether this model is a temporary device for distributing local food, until something better comes along, or a truly viable, long-term business model. As far as Bob is concerned, it doesn’t matter. “Some people are asking, ‘Who are we to do this?’ My response was ‘well, we’re the ones who are doing this, and that’s all the authority we need.’”