INFRA Co-op Profile: Chatham Real Food Market Co-op

The National Co+op Grocers (NCG) is a business services cooperative with over 160 member co-ops that it supports.  Not every co-op however is a member of NCG.  The Independent Natural Foods Retailers Association (INFRA) is also a cooperative that supports 300 independent grocers with over 520 storefronts.  Co-ops such as Rainbow Grocery Co-op in San Fransisco and Caledonia Food Co-op in St. Johnsbury, VT are INFRA members.

I was able to sit down and talk with Andru Moshe and Chris Keefe from Chatham Real Food Market Co-op, in Chatham, NY. The store is around 2,000 sq ft and located in the Hudson Valley, about 30-miles south of Albany.

Andru is the General Manager and had previously spent 12 years at Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op. Chris is the Facilities Manager.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Jeremy DeChario (JD): How long has your co-op been open?

Andru Moshe (AM): I think we incorporated in 2006.

Chris Keefe (CK): Yeah, it kind of started as like a buying club. Members would break up pallets. And then I think the actual retail store opened around 2010.

AM: We have a membership base of about 1,300, and our sales are actually split down the middle with members and non-members. Members spend more than non-members. Our annual sales are a little over 2 million, and we are open six days a week.

We're in the process of getting open on Sundays in about a month to provide access to more people around the area on Sundays.  Our work/life balance is important too, so we think about those things in our hours, pushing our hours in either direction. What does that mean for us? Right now it works. We're in a rural area, so we have a lot of farmers we're connected with and that's in our mission statement. We are currently embarking on strategic planning. We’re looking at a new vision for the future, looking at our mission and seeing where we go next.

JD: Can you tell me about Chatham and your area?

CK: Chatham has a population of a few thousand, not more than 10. We're 15 minutes, 20 minutes to Hudson, which is the nearest city. We’re an hour to Albany and about two and a half hours north of New York City so we do get weekend business from the city folks with their weekend houses in the area.

JD: Chris, you were at the Co-op when you signed on with INFRA, how did you decide on membership? Did you evaluate other options?

CK: Two things. One, we had been working with UNFI as a distributor. The relationship was a little difficult as an independent account with them, and COVID pushed us because UNFI just stopped coming they went past us up to stores in Albany, so we signed with KeHe as our main distributor at the time. I was talking to KeHe like, “how can we get a better pricing ?” and they recommended INFRA. In the past I had looked into NCG, but I believe at the time there was like a minimum sales volume that we weren't hitting. So we weren't really eligible to join NCG. So, we went with INFRA. Getting the deals, the sales, and better representation with the distributor were the biggest deciding factors.

JD: Yeah, and you guys saw significant price savings? Once you signed up, the deals were big, but were there any other big benefits to you from being unaffiliated?

CK: Mostly it was that having a more reliable relationship with our main distributor, but we did see better pricing and [INFRA] is  there like if we want them.

JD: Are there other benefits that you guys have seen or been offered?

AM: They have all the merchandising support.

CK: And there's like an online training section where you can take classes on different topics like retail. We could have new staff sit down and take customer service and retail basics courses.  We also just had a meeting about our sales performance, and they were good about getting our data because now we're submitting to SPINS.

AM: We're a small store and we have a lot of local products and we know we could have them come in here and assess the whole store and make their recommendations on what they think we should be carrying, but we also really enjoy going through that process ourselves and making our decisions based on what we're seeing here, you know, because we know that SPINS data is being pulled from. national and regional, and some of that translates. But I just wanted to add that, that given our size, some of that is just not necessary. It can be useful to look at the data and then go, you know, yay or nay. We want to maintain our uniqueness and not become homogenized.

JD: Do you use a lot of the Every Day Low Price (EDLP) products in different areas? Is that a benefit that you see to your relationship?

AM: We use some. I think INFRA actually has some sort of guidelines that you need to be come in at this level but, because we're so small we can't have a hundred SKUs in this category, it would wipe out our local, so they have been working with us to let us select how much we want to use

CK: They also provide us the flyer of what items are going to go on sale, and then we're able to customize that with our own branding.

JD: Is there an additional cost to customizing?

CK: No, it's just that we need to have InDesign and know how to do it. We do it ourselves. Same with the sale tags, we've branded it with our own co-op brand.

JD: Do they provide you any additional opportunities to connect with peer co-ops around the country or region?

CK: Maybe not directly co-ops, but as members so they've definitely told us about member get-togethers and opportunities to go to a an INFRA store with a bunch of other members and do a walkthrough and they could just point out merchandising decisions that were made.

AM: Yeah, so the peer-to-peer resource, I feel like this is the big difference between NCG and INFRA, is the peer-to-peer resources. And I was speaking with INFRA recently and I asked them if they had any plans to go deeper with the cooperative model because... For me, I'm really interested in education for our employees. And some of the operational stuff translates to an independent store, and to a co-op. But a lot of times we have a completely different organizational structure given our membership and that we don't have, you know, someone that owns the store. It's owned by the whole membership, right? And there's a whole set of principles that we follow that are important going into our work and the decisions that we make. And this is where I think for me, the resources are not there with INFRA on that level. I want to talk to someone at another co-op that's dealing with membership that can speak to directly the issues that we're experiencing. Even though Infra is a co-op of all its members, but yes, that different organizational structure in the stores.

JD: Are there like trade shows or any of those things that you guys get invited to or like have seen like buying shows or conferences or whatever?

AM: We do get invited. I don't remember what the last one was. It was in Long Island. It was at a Cornucopia grocer, you know, like go see what they're doing. Talk with everyone. Everybody talk, you know, get to know one another. And then we get invited to trainings that they have in Minnesota.

JD: If you guys have any issue like does INFRA help you with supplier relations?

AM: Yeah, they're really good about that. We’ve had some distribution issues and their advisors are very attentive to that, it doesn't mean it's going to get fixed right away but the willingness to work through the issues is definitely there to help.

CK: There's other discounts and things. We just gained access to the IX1 product information database through them at no cost as members. That helped us get ingredient data and organic, non-GMO traits for the products that are in our online store. So it really improved the quality of the product listings that we have in our store.

JD: Do they offer you any relationships with like fresh or any of those like produce or prep foods or any of those like sort of categories?

CK: Yeah, there's Four Seasons as a produce distributor. Rainforest was another one.

AM: And they have, you know, partnership discounts with like equipment. I'm sure NCG has that equipment or your paper products. Different. business partnerships that you get discounts on. Those are the only two I can remember, but there's a lot more.

JD:  Were there like. startup costs as you could recall for in like getting engaged with INFRA or anything like that was that part of it um that factored in?

CK: I don't think it factored. There's like annual dues, but then you get a rebate at the end of the year which pretty much covers it.

JD: Awesome. Thank you guys so much for sitting down for me. It was really nice to meet you.