Community Market celebrates 50 years of staying true to its radical roots
The store is having a 50th anniversary party on Saturday, June 28
Community Market is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a party at the Sebastopol store on Saturday, June 28, from 3 pm to 9 pm. There’ll be music, food, a ’70s costume contest with prizes, kids’ play area, and special bargains throughout the store.
Community Market was founded in Santa Rosa 50 years ago this week, and its history offers a fascinating peek at the idealistic politics of that bygone age.
In February 1975, inspired by the health food movement, a group of volunteers formed a buying club in Santa Rosa as a way to make organic, local food accessible to more people.
According to Jenny Hartzog, Community Market’s media director, “It quickly evolved into what was known as the Red Clover Workers Brigade, which was actually several different businesses operating under one umbrella.”
Those businesses included Community Market, which opened on Morgan Street on June 25, 1975, with an all-volunteer staff (they began getting paid in 1976); Sunshine Produce, which sourced all of the produce for the store; Morningstar Trucking Company, an all-women’s trucking company that provided transport for the store’s goods. There was also a bakery that eventually evolved into Alvarado Street Bakery, which remains a worker-owned cooperative to this day.
Community Market moved to its current Santa Rosa location on Mendocino near Santa Rosa Junior College in 1993. The Sebastopol store opened in 2013.
Interestingly, the Red Clover Workers Brigade is still the real name of the company. Community Market is just its DBA (doing business as).
Many people think that Community Market is worker-owned, but it’s more complicated than that.
“We’re a unique business model,” Hartzog said. “We’re actually a Mutual Benefit Corporation. We do not have an owner, and so we are worker-run. We are governed by a board of directors that is made up of worker members. Once a worker has worked here 1,000 hours or a year, they are eligible to become a member, and then they can vote in elections and run for a seat on the board if they want…We have a general manager, and the board is kind of like the checks and balances on the general manager. So it’s all workers, which is really a beautiful thing. It can be challenging at times, but it also is really amazing because everyone has a voice here. That has been the intention from the start, and we have somehow been able to keep that going for 50 years.”
No one who was there for the founding of the company still works at Community Market, though Hartzog said she ran into a customer recently, who’d been involved in the RCWB in1977—and was still a devoted fan of the store.
If you’ve ever shopped at Community Market, you know it’s not like any other grocery store. The big commercial brands that dominate most mainstream stores are simply not there.
“We have a really strict product policy guideline that was created many years ago and then refined over time. That is a process that happens through our board of directors, and then our buyers follow our product policy guidelines. They do research on the companies, and they vet the products and make sure that they are in alignment with what our product policy guidelines are. (You can see an extensive discussion of these policies on their website.)
In general, these policies mean that the food at Community Market—organic, often locally sourced—is more expensive. It’s a trade-off: quality instead of quantity.
Some locally well-known brands got their start at Community Market, including Grateful Bagel, Small Pie, and Bayou on the Bay.
Hartzog said that Community Market’s small size and organizational structure also make it a good place to work.
“What I think is really neat about this organization is that we have the ability to try out these different things. And because there are so many different people that come from different walks of life, we really draw on people’s experiences and ideas,” she said. “What’s special about working here is it really gives people the chance to learn about the food system and where our food comes from.”
“I feel like, there’s a lot more involvement and buy-in here than anywhere else that I've worked because there's a lot of opportunity for people to take ownership of what they're doing, and there’s a lot of room for growth,” Hartzog said, noting that she started out as a parking attendant at the Santa Rosa store, telling SRJC students that they couldn’t park in the store’s parking lot.
While things have changed over 50 years, Hartzog said she feels the store has stayed true to its original mission.
“Something that sometimes gets lost about our story is that we do come from these kinds of activist roots,” she said. “I mean we are a grocery store, and we’ve had to adapt over the years to be a viable business. But we still really believe in our product policies, and we believe in supporting the community and remembering that we do come from these deep activist roots.”
“Our abbreviated mission statement is ‘Food for humans, not for profit,’” she said. “That’s really our guiding light in how we interact with the community and why we do what we do.”
Community Market’s 50th anniversary party is on Saturday, June 28, from 3 pm to 9 pm at their Sebastopol store, 6762 Sebastopol Ave. For details, see the flyer below.
As an 80 year old healthy chef and eater, it’s remarkable and curiously ironic seeing the young slender people that started this kind adventure and the modern people at the pictured staff meeting; In 50 years our society has vastly grown in girth, with some eating well and some savoring sugary and fast. But so many feasting toward diabetes and corresponding challenges of « too much of a good thing », IMHO