I buy most of my dry goods…flours, grains, sugars, beans etc. through a food co-op. What soaps I don’t make I purchase through them, as well as a small amount of frozen and canned goods. This is not your typical way of purchasing food but I have done it for years and it works wonderfully for me.
The way my co-op works is that there are designated drop points along a delivery route, sometimes at a person’s home, a parking lot, or in my case a wide spot in the road off a highway exit. There has to be a minimum order of $550 at each drop point to warrant a delivery. Any number of buyers can make up this total with the minimum per buyer being $50. The monthly the coordinator of that particular drop point will find out approximately when the truck will be there and call all of the buyers. We meet and unload our orders from the back of a refrigerated semi-truck. Sometimes we have to split things into individual orders if we have all purchased the same thing. We visit a short time, say good-bye till next month then go home and unload our items.
Why do I bother with this? Well for two reasons, cost savings and selection. You see I live in a small town with just the bare bones selection of organic grains. Organic white flour and organic whole wheat flour…that is it. Through my co-op I purchase organic oats, rye, spelt, barley, amaranth, millet, white whole wheat, quinoa…all in grain form ready for me to grind or use whole. They have a huge selection or organic rice, popcorn, and other interesting grains. You can choose traditional, organic, or eco-farmed. You can also purchase flour, frozen fruits and veggies, canned goods, personal items, cookware, books, canning supplies, and more!
I get 50# of organic hard red wheat berries for $18.40. This will make #50 pounds of whole wheat flour at about $.37 a pound. When was the last time you bought a 5 pound bag of organic WW flour for $1.84? I cannot even touch these prices in my local supermarket let alone an expensive health food store.
I try to eat as locally as I can but living on the edge of the country in the rain belt there are many things, like most grains and beans, that we just can’t or don’t grow anywhere remotely close to here. So I must either purchase at the local market with their dismal selection and high prices or order monthly, meet the truck, unload it, and bring my purchases home from there. Well with a big family to feed it is an easy decision for me…food co-op it is!
I use Azure Standard as my food co-op, it is nation wide. How can you find a co-op? I originally found out about mine at a homeschool group, the mother’s with large families were discussing the money savings and I was intrigued. Our local feed store owner uses a co-op as does my neighbor, just ask around to see what the locals use. There of course is google! When I searched food co-op with my zip code there were many options listed.
Finding a co-op that works for you, where you live, and how you eat may take a little bit of researching and learning but the saving and selection will make the effort worth while.
So do any of you use a food co-op or any other non-traditional ways of getting your groceries?
Kim can also be found at the inadvertent farmer where she raises organic fruits, veggies, critters, kids and…a camel!
I use a food coop called Associated Buyers in the northeast. Its a group of homeschoolers that buy monthly. The rest is grown here or bought locally for the most part.
Thanks for this post Kim! I was just getting ready to ask how you aquired your grain and other bulk foods. For us, if you can’t get it at the Super Wal-Mart you can’t get it at all. Make’s for a pretty dismal shopping experiance. I’m not aware of a co-op opperating in my area, but I’m sure I just haven’t asked the right person or used the proper handshake. The food underground is pretty hard to find here in farming country. Hope you will do a bit more about storing bulk grains, flour, grinding, etc.
I have some fond, and not-so-fond, memories of co-op purchasing!
When we lived in Churchill [www.churchill.ca], we ran the co-op. Long before the days of internets and computers, my job was typing the “catalogues” for people to order from.
We were two couples running the show with “the other Mom” being the only one at home so she was responsible for communications, gathering orders, sorting orders. The guys were the heavy lifters.
We tried to do a monthly order and between 3 of us being shift-workers it was easy to arrange for the guys and the “real Mom” to meet the train for off-loading.
We had a few accidents, funny how one transposed number can lead to a puzzle at the train station.
One order we wanted liquid Tide, in bulk and received 2-litre bottles of orange pop. The kids loved it, the moms did not!
One early December we thought we were ordering boxes of mandarin oranges but we received a case of four boxes for every order. We had all ordered “lots” so to have quadruple what we needed of a perishable was a bit of a dilemma!
We were able to gift the oranges to the local band council who annually flew a plane around to the native communities with a Santa. That year everyone was full of vitamin C.
What was even more exciting was the annual sea-lift. A ship came once a year, ice conditions allowing, with huge bulk orders of bulky dry goods. If you mess up on a yearly order of feminine hygiene products you get a long time to wallow in your idiocy!
Co-op ordering was a way of life for us for many years and the most important thing to keep in mind is having a sense of humour, adventure and flexibility.
The first year we lived “down south”, hubby had to keep reminding me that I didn’t have to buy 6 tubes of toothpaste at once. If we finished one, a new one was only 10 minutes away!
To this day, 16 years being on the farm, we still do a bulk buy at the co-op annually. There are just some things (toilet paper, for example) I’m not willing to pay attention to more than once a year.
We too order monthly from Azure. I fantasize about not having to go to the grocery store at all, but being able to rely on Azure for all the things we don’t/can’t produce ourselves. That’ll be a great day! (And we happen to be a large family & I have in fact gushed about what a money saver Azure is at our homeschool functions, lol!)
[…] grains are a problem for us. We don’t have a good source for them. Kim’s post about using a food co-op got us thinking and looking, but we haven’t found one yet. We are really pushing hard on this. We […]