Dinner and Discussion has been postponed to July 7.

Our Dinner and Discussion event is happening next Monday, June 23. If you haven’t registered yet, please do so by Thursday, June 19. We plan to have an evening of delicious food from our Food Services team and rich discussions about the future vision of our co-op. We hope you will join us to partake in this visioning process. The event will be held at the Chapel on the Greenway Institute campus (formerly VCFA). The doors will open at 4:30 pm and dinner will be served at 5 pm. You can learn more and register here. 

If you haven’t heard, United Natural Foods Inc., our largest supplier of natural foods, experienced a cyber-attack about a week and a half ago, which shut down their operations nationwide. You may have noticed here and elsewhere the resulting reduction in products on the shelves.  They are working to resume normal operations and have been providing us with limited deliveries of products. There has been a lot of work behind the scenes here at the Co-op to secure alternative product options, I want to acknowledge the work of our lead buyer and buying team for working diligently with our regional and local suppliers to fill in the gaps where possible. This situation has highlighted the strength and importance of our local and regional food systems. The prevalence of local in our product mix has helped to buffer us from the full impacts of this experience. Those who are not part of such a system have felt more negative impacts. Thank you for your patience and support as we navigate through this challenge.  

You may be aware that there are proposed reductions in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding along with the introduction of additional barriers to participation in the program. The Co-op signed a letter to congress with Rural Vermont, Hanover Co-op Food Stores, and hopefully co-ops nationwide, speaking out against the pending cuts to the program. We also included this paragraph in support of the letter:  

“As a co-op, making healthy food available to our community is central to our mission, and everyone is welcome here. To that end, we accept both SNAP and WIC in our store.  Another way we make our co-op more accessible is through our Co-op Cares program and our Healthy Access Fund. Co-op Cares provides a 10% discount on groceries to qualifying members, and the Healthy Access Fund assists with equity payments for members in need.  Both programs rely on participation in the SNAP program as a qualifying factor. If funding is cut, and it becomes more difficult to access these programs, fewer people will be able to access the healthy food they need. The implications of this are wide ranging – hunger makes everything harder. If anything, we need to strengthen SNAP and programs like it, not cut them. Please stand with us in support of families and individuals having access to healthy food.” 

 If you would like to speak out about this too, here is a list of the people this letter will be directed to:  

• The Honorable John Thune, Senate Republican Leader
  511 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 Phone: (202) 224-2321 
•  The Honorable Charles E. Schumer, Senate Majority Leader
  322 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 Phone: (202) 224-6542 
•  The Honorable Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House
  521 Cannon House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Phone: (202) 225-2777 
• The Honorable Hakeem Jeffries, House Democratic Leader
  2267 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Phone: (202) 225-5936