About the Nashville Food Co-op

A community grocery

The mission of the Nashville Food Co-op is to support the community of Nashville & provide year-round access to local food through a member-owned co-operative grocery store. Our year round, locally-owned grocery store will offer local meats, dairy, produce, & other products as the season allows, while also offering other goods that one may look for during a grocery shopping trip: dry goods, home & health products, and paper goods.

Our beginnings

The Nashville Food Co-op started as an idea of a small group that has since expanded. Two of our founding members have lived in Vermont, where co-ops are everywhere and an integral part of the food system. They got together with some like-minded locals and started the Nashville Food Co-op to bring this model, which is popular all over the country, to the city we love and call home.

Nashville needs a food co-op

In 2015, we started with a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $15,000 in 30 days. That money funded a professional market study, which helped to see how feasible a food cooperative would be in our city. After receiving positive results from this study, we developed our leadership board and claimed our mission.

The co-op model for growth

With the help of the Food Co-op Initiative, a nation-wide non-profit that works with start-up food co-ops, we are making your store a reality. They’ve helped us define our goal Co-Owner numbers & predict our store size to be 12,000 sq ft, approximately the size of a Walgreens. If you are looking for a place to share community over local food, we welcome you to join our community today!

Our growth process

Our growth process is driven by Ownership & consists of five major steps. We are currently in the first phase of growth, where we define our mission, begin recruiting members, and begin generating funds.

Based on our current trends in growth, we are working toward the following ownership goals:

  • 150 Co-Owners by the end of 2020
  • 300 Co-Owners by the end of 2021
  • 600 Co-Owners & start looking for a LOCATION by the end of 2022
  • 1200 Co-Owners & OPEN by the end of 2024