Highlights of a Productive Year
Our Co-op operates on a July 1 through June 30 fiscal year, so it's a good time to look back and summarize the past year. Our sales this year surpassed the $30 million milestone. Among non-chain co-ops, we are the second largest in sales in our national co-op organization, the NCGA. This is a remarkable feat considering Burlington is a very small city. Sales growth came in at 5% over the prior year which is very respectable performance in a recession. And once again, our Co-op did an excellent job controlling costs.
The recession has sent several ripples through our Co-op. Food stamp redemption (3SquaresVT) is way up, about 22% over last year. Sales through our Food for All Program, which adds a 10% discount to eligible customers who use food stamps, WIC and disability, is up a whopping 21% over last year. The senior discount is up 17% over last year. The member worker discount is up 22% over last year. You will notice that discounts grew at a significantly higher rate than sales. Our Co-op certainly faces a challenge sustaining these discounts moving into the future.
One of the most thrilling trends of the year is the continued strong growth in Co-op membership. It’s remarkable to think that at the start of the 2009 fiscal year we had 2725 members. Today we have over 6700! We passed another important milestone midway through the past year – for the first time since our store opened, over 50% of our sales are to members! This is especially important for our future sustainability considering the average member spends $28 per visit while a nonmember spends $16.
In our product mix we see organic sales growth in our Produce Department continuing to outpace conventional sales growth. We've added over 25% more Fair Trade products in the last year. Local product sales continue to rise despite the terrible weather- related start to this local produce season.
We've developed a nifty metric to measure energy use at the Co-op. We track kilowatts per customer. I'm happy to report that our energy use per customer declined this year compared to last as a result of the installation of our solar panels (two years ago) and LED lighting (this year).
One of our two major outreach goals is the eradication of childhood hunger. Rob Meehan, Executive Director of the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf, tells me that hunger remains very high in our community and is growing. Rob asked me to thank our members for their incredible generosity and support. When our Co-op opened in this location we agreed to pay the Food Shelf $90,000 by 2013. I'm happy to say that that we are making our last installment on that obligation and it will be paid off this October. This will not end our support of the Food Shelf. Between donations of both product and money from the Co-op and customer contributions, we send the Food Shelf over $40,000 a year and plan to continue to donate.
Our second major outreach goal is to strengthen the local food supply. As you all know, the record rainfall in May has been disastrous to Intervale farmers. For the second year in a row, we made acommitment to donate $10,000 to the Intervale Center to help preserve this extraordinarily valuable asset to our community.
Upon review, I hope you’ll agree we’ve had a remarkably productive year here at our Co-op and we’re headed into another one for this next fiscal year. Our success is made possible by the vision and commitment of our extraordinarily generous members and customers. Thank you for your support of our Co-op!