We’re adopting Co-op Basics starting August 1, 2020.
Spiral Co-op is extremely excited to announce our adoption of National Co-op Grocer (NCG)’s Co+op Basics program. This program offers a number of “Basic” items throughout the store at a significantly reduced price. NCG is able to secure excellent pricing through the combined buying power of the cooperative. Because, as a group, we are able to guarantee that we can purchase large quantities of these products, we can get them under bulk pricing and pass that savings on to our customers.
These basic items are easily identifiable around the store because they will be called out using a purple Co+op Basics tag. If you have shopped at other cooperative grocery stores around the area, you may already be familiar with these tags. Because this is a program that NCG members have to opt-in to utilize, there are uniform rules that each co-op must follow in order to gain access to the specialized pricing. This means that if you are looking at the same Co-op Basics product at two different co-ops they will likely be the same price. The Basics program has set thresholds for each item, unifying pricing across program participants. The price can be lower than that threshold (ex: sale pricing), but it has a set ceiling.
A program like this benefits our shoppers by providing more high quality items for budget friendly prices. Also, because the program focuses on basics, these are the pantry staples that our community is buying most often.
If you’ve been following our movement through our NCG roll-out, this is step 2. We have had coupons on the shelves for several weeks, and now we are switching the prices on the products that fall under the Basics umbrella. Once we understand how the pricing change is going to affect the store and our shoppers we will systematically bring in more products from the Basics program where we see a good fit. Because NCG is large, and they serve much larger co-ops than Spiral, there are many more products available to us than we could reasonably fit into our store. With every new addition we will be looking for ways to best serve our community, so feedback is essential. Please let us know if you like our new pricing. Also help us understand what products you are looking for by filling out a comment card in the store. We do our best to anticipate the needs of our shoppers, but we can always use helpful suggestions.