How food co-ops helped build the organics movement

A once radical idea has reshaped the food system.

Organic strawberries, once rare in grocery stores, now fill Walmart’s produce aisles. Costco is the country’s largest seller of organic food. Hershey’s even introduced an organic version of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in 2021.

For some longtime organic shoppers, such developments felt like a contradiction — a movement born in opposition to industrial agriculture had finally been absorbed by it. For others it’s evidence of triumph rather than compromise.

Either way, the widespread adoption of organics is the result of a movement built by many hands.

Organic didn’t become mainstream simply because consumers demanded it. Farmers, certifiers, distributors, mission-driven companies, and especially food co-ops spent decades crafting the social, economic, and institutional conditions that enabled organic to move from fringe to the center of American grocery shopping.

Most notable was the counter-culture movement of the 1960s and 1970s whose members grabbed hold of organic principles, integrated them into buying clubs and stores, educated their communities, cultivated consumer expectations, supported certification before federal standards, built supply chain infrastructure so organic could proliferate, and eventually defended standards as the market expanded.

Even now, co-ops support organics far more than other outlets. Food co-ops reported stocking 38% organic products in stores in a National Co-op Grocers report in 2023, compared with 25% in natural grocery stores and 3% in conventional grocery stores.

Food co-ops have always been at the fulcrum of the ‘organic movement’.

Organics deeper roots

In many ways, the organic movement was a recovery project: a rediscovering of principles that have guided human relationships with land for millennia: healthy soils, interconnected ecosystems, and reciprocity between people and place.

Organic was not about inventing something entirely new, but about resisting a growing separation between human beings and living systems in a turbulent era. It was a stake in the ground declaring: we are of the earth, not at war with it.

Building an organic future required more than organic farmers, it required people who understood food, nutrition, and supply chains.

That’s why food co-ops mattered.

Between 1969 and1979, upwards of 10,000 food co-ops were established across the United States. These co-ops were as much about education, information and movement building as they were about selling food.

As Warren Belasco wrote in Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry, co-ops became “neighborhood outposts of the countercuisine,” providing “advice, moral support, and living examples unavailable through regular media and markets.” Guidebooks for alternative living were often first circulated through co-ops, including the bestselling 1976 handbook for vegetarian cookery, Laurel’s Kitchen, which emerged from the Organic Foods Co-op in Berkeley, California.

Volunteer-run co-ops became classrooms as much as grocery stores – sometimes literally, with instruction on nutrition and cooking. Members weighed and bagged, cut and wrapped, and filled their own reusable containers. An entire generation began to see and understand a food system largely hidden by conventional supermarkets. They reshaped it, too, through ingredient transparency, nutritional information, and communicating the social and ecological impacts of food.

Organic also required infrastructure.

Through the creation of regional cooperative warehouses and distribution networks in the 1970s, food co-ops helped build the architecture of an organic food supply – creating the pathways for food dollars to flow from eaters to producers.

This influence was achieved through scale.

“These new wave co-ops – scattered from Louisville to NYC, from Chicago to rural Maine, from Austin to the Puget Sound – are selling more than half a billion dollars worth of food each year,” wrote Daniel Zwerdling in 1979. He also noted: “Some of the people who work and shop at co-ops seem almost starved for a sense of communion with the earth and with their food and the co-ops help provide it.”

How food co-ops BUIlt a market for organics

An established brand like Hershey can introduce an organic peanut butter cup today with relatively little risk. The corporation can test demand, secure distribution, and rely on an existing organic marketplace.

But that marketplace did not appear on its own. It was built by organizations willing to take risks when organic was still uncertain, expensive, and unfamiliar. Food co-ops played a crucial role by creating the early demand that allowed the entire system to develop.

The equation was simple:

• Farmers could transition to organic because co-ops would buy their products.
• Manufacturers could launch organic products because co-ops would stock them.
• Certifiers could emerge because co-ops required verification.
• Distributors could specialize because co-ops created reliable demand.
• Consumers could trust organic because co-ops explained what it meant.

Co-ops gave organic a place to grow before anyone knew exactly what organic would become.

Protecting organic integrity

As organic entered the mainstream in the 1990s, the regional warehouses that had helped build the movement, were gradually outgrown, acquired, or displaced by larger national distributors. In response, food co-ops formed what would become National Co+op Grocers (NCG).

Today, NCG is collectively owned by 169 co-ops, operating 241 stores across 40 states, giving independent co-ops the collective purchasing power to continue shaping the marketplace.

But shaping the marketplace increasingly meant engaging beyond the shelves. As organic expanded into mainstream retail, protecting the integrity of the label became as important as building the market itself.

Few individual food co-ops have the resources to engage consistently in national policy, which is why the organic food sector formed the National Organic Coalition (NOC) and the Organic Trade Association (OTA). Many food co-ops actively participate on NOC calls and advocacy work, while PCC’s Mike Wenrick currently serves on its board of directors.

For the broader food co-op community, that advocacy is carried by NCG. Twice each year, Senior Advocacy Manager Mandy Makinen travels to Capitol Hill to defend the standards co-op shoppers helped establish.

“We’re making sure the organic regulations don’t get watered down so that consumers can continue to trust the Certified Organic label,” she says. NCG’s Vice President of Advocacy & Sustainability, Allie Mentzer, also serves on NOC’s board.

The hidden benefits of organics

Organic has never been only about ecological and human health. It has also been about preserving agricultural knowledge, sustaining farming communities, and ensuring that the people closest to the source of our food can make a living from it.

Consumer food co-ops helped create demand for organic food long before it was commercially viable. Farmer cooperatives like Organic Valley built on that foundation in the late 80s, creating a reliable national market for organic milk at a time when government policies were failing to provide a viable future for many family farms.

By the time Hershey put an organic seal on a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in 2021, the hard work had already been done.

Decades earlier, thousands of food co-ops helped build the markets, trust, supply chains, and public expectations that made such a product imaginable.

Organic didn’t simply go mainstream.

It was cooperatively made.

Jon Steinman is a food systems thinker, author, and educator with a 25-year career shaping how communities engage with food. He is the author of Grocery Story: The Promise of Food Co-ops in the Age of Grocery Giants (New Society Publishers) www.grocerystory.coop