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 Mission
To be a community-owned business that empowers Nashville and serves as an economic engine for change. To be a community space for Nashville that provides a locally focused, sustainably operated, and cooperatively owned full-service grocery store.
We will do this by running a business that:
• Connects the Nashville community to our food system & to each other.
• Considers people & the planet in the forefront of our decision-making.
• Prioritizes access to and support of local food producers and systems.
Our History
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.
In 2015, we started with a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $15,000 in 30 days. These donations helped fund our professional market study that provided encouraging evidence that Nashville is ready for a food co-op. We are working hard to make our co-op grocery a reality for our Nashville community.
Our Growth
With the help of the Food Co-op Initiative, a nation-wide non-profit that works with start-up food co-ops, we have defined our goal Co-Owner numbers as we work to build an approximately 12,000 sq ft sized store. If you are looking for a place to share community over local food, we welcome you to join our community today!
Our growth process is driven by Ownership & consists of five major steps. We moved out of the first phase of growth at the beginning of 2022, where we defined our mission and began recruiting members and generating funds. The second phase of growth will consist of assessing feasibility for our store, finalizing our business strategy, and building local producer relationships.
Based on our current trends in growth, we are working toward the following ownership goals:
- 300 Co-Owners by the end of 2021 (goal met in January 2022!)
- 600 Co-Owners & start looking for a LOCATION by the end of 2022
- 1200 Co-Owners & OPEN by the end of 2024
