Jerelyn Wilson, BFC Shareholder
Anniversaries can kind of creep up on you. Have you had that experience? Even just birthdays – it’s the same thing. It can surprise us when we say something was just a few years ago, and then, oh my, it was 10 years ago! Amazingly, there are still numerous people in the area who can say they have seen all 50 years of the Brattleboro Food Co-op! Although I can’t make that claim, I have experienced 42 of those 50 years, and they include three of its four retail store locations.
The first location was really a buying club—not a retail store—in the basement of the Green Mountain Health Center located at 22 High St.
Here is what I learned from a friend about the buying club:
One of my good friends—no doubt like many others—met her husband while waiting in line to pick up her order! They’re still happily married all these years later.
After the High Street basement location, the next move of the Coop was to the Maple Farms Dairy building on Putney Road, next to the Marina restaurant (retail store #1). Members were excited because now there were extra walk-in hours Fri & Sat for pickup, a childcare room and bulk self-serve, or as one person put it, “self spill,” for a number of products including maple syrup and peanut butter. Dwight Miller delivered 50 gallon barrels for bulk self-serve apple cider. The Co-op now had a retail store!
Next move was three years later, in 1979, to Flat Street, right in downtown Brattleboro! Retail store #2.
Have you been into the new used bookstore, Book Lovers, right next to the Transportation Center (formerly Vermont Center for Photography)? That’s where I first shopped at the Co-op when I moved to the area in 1983. It was a bit dark with a wood-and-concrete floor. The tall, 2×4 wood shelves were packed with all kinds of good food. It smelled earthy, the air full of chatter.
Being new to Brattleboro in my late 20’s I found the Co-op very welcoming. It felt warm, inviting, and carried the food I liked to eat. It turned out to be a good place to meet people and within four years not only was I shopping there but I was also involved as the newsletter editor. I hear people new to the area now say the same thing: the Co-op is a great place to meet people if you are new to town!
I still have my copy of the very first mailed issue of “Food for Thought” – June/July 1987. General Manager, Alex Gyori had the front-page article. “This is your publication, a service of your Co-op to share thoughts, to provide members with news of the Co-op, and to educate us all on food-related issues. As the Co-op grows, we want to maintain close communications with members – all members.”
That’s still the goal of the now twice-monthly digital newsletter: to keep members and shoppers informed and provide connection with each other and the community.
The Co-op’s General Manager for 42 years (1987-2015), Alex Gyori discovered his interest in organic food and healthy lifestyles while living in Sydney, Australia. It was here in Brattleboro at Fort Dummer—sitting around a campfire—where a fellow camper told him about the Co-op on Flat Street. He went there soon after and found a community of people who shared his values.
Alex remembers his time leading up to becoming General Manager. “At the time, every Co-op member needed to do four hours of work each quarter. I remember filling jars with herbs and spices, and once—when a worker didn’t show up, in what was the scariest assignment ever—I was re-routed to the childcare room to look after a five-week-old infant!” That infant was Ezra Distler. Ezra and his mother Arlene, are still in our community.
The one-year newsletter anniversary issue, June/July 1988, mentions a possible move to the “recently vacated grocery store in the Brattleboro Plaza, former site of the P&C Supermarket.” The Flat Street store was a good steppingstone, but the space was hard to clean. Alex told me that “the Flat Street store was fairly basic. It served the purpose, but it had its quirks: for example, trying to mop the floors at night was a trip—the mop strings would often get wrapped around protruding nails in the floor, despite our relentless attempts to improve the floor’s surface!”
The Co-op was growing both in membership and sales. We were growing and after nine years at Flat Street, we were ready for a bigger facility.
The move into the old P&C Plaza took place in 1988. Compared with the 2,000 square feet of retail space we had at Flat Street, The Plaza would provide a spacious 8,000 square feet. There were now about 1,400 members. Alex remembers that “the move was overwhelmingly supported by the members, and it went well, overall—with a few hiccups, of course.
In preparation for the move, many members helped recondition the used metal grocery shelving, walk-in coolers, and other equipment that we’d bought at the auction when P&C moved out. I got to know many members better while working alongside them—lots of those friendships formed during the move have endured to this day. A lot of members brought their trucks along when we did the actual move on the Friday after Thanksgiving of 1988—I remember that some of those helpers were proud that they’d helped in all the other preceding moves!
When we finally opened the store on the Monday after Thanksgiving (retail store #3), I remember some folks walking through the aisles, looking at the clean walls, pushing shopping carts for the first time, and expressing their dismay at how “sterile” it all looked. Interestingly, I observed that same reaction when we moved into the current new store in 2012—folks missing the “old” store (the plaza, not the Flat Street one)!”
But the Plaza location became home. It had its quirks and constraints, but we got used to it as the membership grew. We got through various controversies, such as the decision to carry meat and fish. During the 24 years in the old P&C building—and the gradual expansion into some of the other storefronts in that shopping plaza along the Whetstone Brook—the Co-op expanded to over 8,000 members.
The last move of the Co-op, completed in 2012, took an order-of-magnitude more planning than the others. The idea was to build an entirely new building on the Plaza property that had housed the P&C and then the Co-op for almost a quarter-century. In discussions about the need to expand, the Co-op considered moving out to Putney Road and taking over the old Grand Union store. But a key decision was made to remain where we were as a downtown anchor—and a place where less mobile residents could shop. This was made possible by BAST Corporation agreeing to sell us the entire Plaza property.
Gossens Bachman Architects (GBA) was hired to design a unique building that would house not only 23,000 square feet of Co-op retail space and 13,000 square feet of other Co-op space, but also two upper floors with 24 units of affordable housing that would be owned by Windham and Windsor Housing Trust.
Following several years of planning a design, work began on this unique building that would hug Canal Street, with parking hidden beyond. Among the environmental features is a heat-recovery system that captures waste heat from refrigeration to heat the Administrative space and apartment units on the upper floors.
Move-in to the new (current) space (retail store #4) took place in 2012. As with all of our other moves, not everyone was happy with the new store. Some felt our little Co-op was getting too big, or too corporate, or too something else. But the Co-op membership kept growing—there are now some 9,200 of us.
Many of those of us who have been members for a long time are thrilled at the important role the Co-op has played in downtown Brattleboro, and in support of area nonprofit organizations through initiatives like the Round Up for Change program. Yes, there have been growing pains, and we’ve struggled at times with cutting-edge (bleeding-edge) systems like the heat recovery system that heats upper floors, but I think most of us remain very proud of the Brattleboro Food Co-op.