Answering your Questions About COVID-19 and the Co-op

| Covid-19

What you need to know about Shopping the Co-op during Covid-19:

  • August 27, 2021:
    • We want to inform you that a Co-op grocery employee tested positive for COVID-19. They were last at work on Monday, August 23. The staff member is quarantining at home, all close contacts have been informed, and are also being tested prior to return to work. From what we know of the situation, there is no reason to believe this case is associated with the earlier positive case announced on August 25th.We are in touch with the Department of Health, and are making sure that all employees have all the information they need for testing, vaccination, and quarantine protocols.

      Safety of our staff, our Shareholders, and our community continues to be our greatest priority. We have recently reinstituted a mask mandate in the store. Please abide by our mask requirement, wash your hands frequently, and consider avoiding large group gatherings to keep our community safe.

Brattleboro Food Co-op Staff member tests positive for COVID-19

| Covid-19

This week we learned that a staff member in our Front End tested positive for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Upon learning of the result, we moved quickly to notify our local health department to discuss our plan and also began deep cleaning, additional sanitizing, and contact tracing within the staff. We are following all recommended guidelines from public health authorities, including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and city, county, and state public health departments.

The staff member in question works only in the Front End at the Brattleboro Food Co-op. They last worked on Thursday December 31 in the Front End.

A Day in the Life of a Brattleboro Food Co-op Employee, Pandemic Style

I work at the Shareholder Services desk at the Co-op. In mid-March I returned one week early from a trip to the Pacific Northwest and California, quarantined for two weeks, and then came back to find a completely transformed workplace. It was shocking: the business had been completely reinvented in less than a month. No customers at 10 am on Tuesday when I arrived, just a sort of warehouse feel with a bunch of very busy colleagues, as though all the grocery aisles were just for storing food for purchase, none of the browsing or chatting, just dry storage, cold storage, freezers full of future shipments.