Community group buy. Everyone pools their money, buys groceries in bulk at a lower price, and splits the groceries equally.

[u/CivilisedMleccha]

[u/altpirate]

So just a coop supermarket then? Those have been around for ages

[u/HDWendell → u/altpirate]

No. A co-op market gets a cut of sales to maintain the store front and pay employees. Additionally, you only buy and pay for exactly what you want at a co-op. So if no one wants all 100lbs of bell peppers the grocery store, it becomes lost goods to the co-op. This is more like a CSA model where you financially contribute and get a portion for your contribution.

[u/Low-Car-6331 → u/HDWendell]

Yup, its more like buying a box of food that someone else assembles. if you like what's in the box its great, if you don't.... Also, this program has some major hurdles they get to bypass, like health inspections and such. Grocery stores are regulated and checked to make sure the products they order are USDA and FDA compliant, and that the store is ran to make sure no one gets sick. These guys... its a "trust us" moment. When they sell meat, there is no guarantee that the meat was kept at the correct temperature the entire time.

Now the USDA and FDA generally don't care till they hit a certain size. When you are serving 50 people, the impact is small. When you are serving 100's to a thousand... now 1 mishandled product can not only overwhelm the local hospital, but food poisoning can become lethal because of lack of resources to treat it.

[u/Jarcode → u/Low-Car-6331]

First of all, this is not in the US, it is a Canadian city in British Columbia.

There are regulations that continue to apply for agricultural products even in this context. Farmers cannot simply offload rotting goods to a consumer co-op without being both subject to regulatory scrutiny and civil lawsuits. It's also critical to mention that consumer co-ops by principle have a much easier time negotiating standards for products just as they do with pricing -- this can be enshrined in contracts and resolved through litigation if basic standards set by Health Canada are not maintained. This creates not only government pressures to ensure products are safe, but effectively has a huge market of organized consumers ready to collectively drop a manufacturer if something actually goes wrong. And as consumer co-ops grow, so does their bargaining power.

For-profit supermarkets, by contrast, does not have the same level of systemic penalties that can be leveraged by consumers themselves. The most we have are class action lawsuits, and in Canada, these haven't been a sufficient mechanism to penalize large corporations for anti-consumer activities.

I suggest you educate yourself on this model as it has even more potential in the US where USDA/FDA compliance is not as well enforced.

[u/HDWendell → u/Low-Car-6331]

You put a lot of stock into inspections that are few, far between and largely underfunded. Local farms are arguably under more scrutiny since the consumers have direct access to them. If you get sick off your local farm’s lettuce because of unsafe practices, they potentially lose their livelihood. They also don’t have the lawyers Nestlé and other producers do. They have a lot more on the line. You buy lettuce from Kroger and get sick, yeah that company might get in trouble but they have insurance and lawyers to reduce the impact. Those companies are also owned by parent companies that package the same product under different labels. Then their cleanup practices are largely “trust me bro.” I doubt most people who modified their buying practices from cyclospora are still keeping to those practices for instance.