ALL NATURAL: Coffee Co-Opers Gain Popularity

The hippies are back!

This proves it:

More people seek organic foods

By Karyn Saemann
Correspondent for The Capital Times

McFARLAND - For 18 months, it has been McFarland's hotspot of liberalism.

"We have a lot of progressive meetings here," said Tim Tynan, owner of the News & Brews coffeehouse and book shop that opened in April 2005 at 4840 Larson Beach Road.

Of the two Madison daily newspapers, only The Capital Times is sold at News & Brews.

And the coffee and everything you might put in it - from steamed milk to chocolate - is entirely organic.

Photo by Henry A. Koshollek/The Capital Times Tim Tynan, owner of the News & Brews coffeehouse and book shop.

Photo by Henry A. Koshollek/The Capital Times Trillium Co-op with Becky Rehl in Mt. Horeb.

Tynan said it quickly became clear that his regular customers "are the same kind of people who would go into a natural food co-op." Many already belong to established natural grocers like Madison's Willy Street Co-op. Some are heavily involved in the local farmers' markets.

"Many of them are looking for organic, or at least ethical, food items," Tynan said.

Tynan and his wife are also big advocates of the Slow Food Movement, an international effort to safeguard the link between culture and food and to discourage the global blurring of tastes by mass marketing.

Last spring, Tynan asked customers to sign a clipboard if they might be interested in forming a grocery co-op in McFarland. Five-hundred signatures later, the idea took flight.

This summer, 55 respondents to a community survey backed the notion. At an Oct. 1 organizational dinner, 29 people paid either $55 for an individual membership or $90 for a family one. Three more have since joined, for a total of 32.

Tynan said talk of a storefront can begin if membership reaches 50. Applications are available at his store and at other village businesses. At this pace, Tynan said a storefront could be a reality by early 2007.

About a dozen McFarland residents have already formed a buyers club, a loose version of a co-op without a storefront. They purchase organic products in bulk through the coffee shop's distributor and pick them up at News & Brews.

Statewide trend: A generation after natural foods co-ops emerged in wide numbers in the 1970s, Wisconsin is seeing a new surge in interest, said Anne Reynolds, assistant director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives.

A group in Stoughton has formed to consider establishing a co-op. Many of the Stoughton exploratory group's members were regular customers of the Main Street Market, an alternative grocery store that closed earlier this year in Stoughton.

Other communities are also testing the waters.

Since opening in 2004, Barneveld's Harvest Market Cooperative has grown to 410 members who paid $100 to join. The rented storefront at 101 S. Jones St. was previously a traditional grocery store.

Harvest Market manager Brenda Evans said she believes the greatest draw is the desire to shop locally to support the community, which continues to grow after a 1984 tornado that devastated this small Iowa County village.

A 2006 report by University of Wisconsin researchers showed the number of cooperative grocery storefronts in the state rose by just one between 1999 and 2005, up from 30 to 31.

The numbers of members soared, however, up 43 percent from 61,248 in 1999 to 87,485 in 2005. The number of full-time grocery co-op employees - a strong indicator of business success - more than quadrupled in those years, up from 262 to 1,271. And gross sales more than doubled, up from $165 million to $424 million.

"We take in new members every week. It's mind-boggling, really," said Becky Rehl, manager of the Trillium Natural Foods Community Co-op at 517 Springdale St. in Mount Horeb. The co-op formed in 2001 and now has 220 members.

Existing co-ops are lending newcomers a hand. A recent organizational meeting in Stoughton drew not only representatives from the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives, but also the Willy Street Co-op, who said it would help in any way short of actually founding and operating a store in Stoughton.

Reynolds attributes the resurgence to a desire by people to have grocery stores that are grounded in the community. Unlike a large chain, a grocery co-op owned by members won't suddenly pick up and leave, she said.

Healthy eating: Highly publicized scares like the recent, nationwide e-coli contamination of spinach have opened people's eyes, Reynolds added. There is "an increasing awareness of not only eating more healthy food, but also having some idea of where it came from," she said.

Part of the growth in membership in Mount Horeb, Rehl said, is simply due to population. Since 1980, the number of village residents has doubled to 6,400.

But Rehl also agreed that people are looking for food grown close to home.

"I think there is more consciousness that it really does matter where our food comes from, and how far it has come," Rehl said. "There are some great Wisconsin products, and we try to carry them."

"There is also an increasing awareness that it really does matter what you put in your body," Rehl continued. "More people are making healthy choices and they are seeking us out as a resource."

In addition to stocking local produce, Rehl said Trillium has cheese from local cheese factories. When Trillium's distributor stopped carrying a certain cheese made in Green County, Rehl said she and her husband began personally driving there to pick it up.

Trillium also has local milk in glass bottles and locally made yogurt. Since last year, in response to customer requests, it has offered local meat.

Breads from local bakeries "are sometimes still warm, in paper bags," Rehl said.

There's also a limited selection of frozen dinners and other organic convenience food and an increasing supply of things geared toward special diets, like gluten-free bread. And, as with most co-ops, they do carry daily needs like toilet paper.

Since 2001, when Trillium superseded the Mount Horeb General Store, a more loosely organized natural foods cooperative that Rehl and others had run as volunteers since the 1970s, it has shed its "hippie" image.

"One of the biggest hurdles we have had over the years was the perception that the General Store was a hippie crowd, a bunch of people smoking pot," she said.

They've have come a long way, Rehl said, from the days when General Store volunteers babysat each other's children so they could take turns at the counter.

Today, Trillium has paid employees and has joined the Mount Horeb Area Chamber of Commerce "to try to connect with the more respectable, business part of the world," Rehl said.

And she said its natural remedy selections and vitamin supplements have garnered more interest as mainstream doctors become increasingly comfortable with referring patients to them.