On Sundays after church, Colleen Walker likes to stop by the newly opened Detroit People’s Food Co-op for groceries.
“It’s phenomenal; when you come here there’s always something new,” said Walker, who lives just down the street from the grocery store on Woodward Ave. and E. Euclid St. in the city’s North End.
She used to shop at Kroger or Trader Joe’s, two corporations that don’t have a single store in Detroit, and was one of many Detroiters who took their grocery spending to the suburbs accounting for millions of dollars going out of the city each year. But since the Detroit People’s Food Co-op grocery store opened in May 2024 on what was once a grass lot, Walker can now help support her own community.
“I like to keep the money in the neighborhood,” she said. “The co-op is a blessing to the community, not only to African Americans but to the community as a whole.”
Perhaps better than any other food co-op in the country, the Detroit People’s Food Co-op has experienced a strong start financially while maintaining community principles, according to national co-op leaders.
Since its opening in May 2024, the store did nearly $3 million in sales through December and grew to over 4,000 member-owners and more than 30 employees. It offers a beloved hot food bar, regularly hosts community events like Monday chess nights and a seven-day Kwanza event, and gives away hundreds of free meals. Together, member-owners and board members met regularly to shape operations, events programming and anti-racism work at the store.
The work has earned high praise from national co-op leaders who say the store’s strong first eight months have been unparalleled.
“We’re extremely excited by the sales results so far of the co-op, pretty much right on target of their projections,” said JQ Hannah, director of programming for the Food Co-op Initiative that has helped 181 co-ops open across the country, including DPFC.
“We attribute a lot of that to some unique things that Detroit did with their opening that will be a guide to other food co-ops as they open,” she said, highlighting the emphasis on community.
“They’ve arguably done the best job of creating continuity of community organizing from start to open,” she said, out of the dozens of co-ops across the country she’s helped open over the last decade. “They came in strong with making the space that was also for community gathering, affirming community culture. I don’t know if we’ve ever seen a startup pull it off to the level that Detroit has.”
Detroit People’s Food Co-op President Lanay Gilbert-Williams said while there’s been success, there is still work to be done.
“We’ve seen a lot of growth, but the sky’s the limit,” Gilbert-Williams said at a January quarterly meeting for members. One challenge the co-op faces is ongoing unfamiliarity with what a co-op is, she said.
A food co-op is a grocery store collectively owned and governed by members of the community who have voting power, rather than one individual or a corporation. The profits are reinvested in the community and given back to community members, rather than profiting a single person or corporation.
“A cooperative is an attempt at shifting power,” Gilbert-Williams reminded members at Saturday’s meeting attended by approximately 50 people in-person and online.
In the case of the Detroit co-op, the goal was to create a Black-led grocery store in a majority-Black city without many Black-owned grocery stores and where millions of dollars each year are spent at grocery stores in the suburbs.
Related to some people not being familiar with a co-op, there has been some public critique that the prices are high at the co-op.
Hannah said it’s something co-ops across the country grapple with.
“It is a challenge that we are all up against as owners of co-ops, that there are unfair practices in place,” she said.
The true cost of food, when taking into account social and environmental factors, is nearly three times as much as what we’re used to paying, according to a 2021 report by The Rockefeller Foundation.
“We’re trying to create accessible prices for our communities while keeping economic control of our food systems. We are never going to be the cheapest. Our job is to work very hard to adjust prices to make respectful and fair prices.”
Typically, co-ops make adjustments within the first six months to create more affordable prices for core products, Hannah said.
Co-op officials stressed at January’s meeting that they are continually learning and adjusting based on member feedback, like adding more discounts for members.
Quarterly, meetings are held for members where board and grocery store leaders give updates on finances, staffing, operations, and other committees the co-op has, like anti-racism and disability and aging. Dinner is provided at the meetings and members are entered for free into raffles of items made by Black producers that the co-op works with.
Detroit People’s Food Co-op General Manager Akil Talley urged members to keep up the support by shopping at the store more frequently and getting others on board.
“We still need support. We still need more number owners,” Talley said, hinting at a possible second location in the co-op’s future. “We want to be able to, in five, seven years, have enough money to go over to the far west side of the city and start looking at buildings or
building our own structure.”
The co-op’s annual meeting will be held March 15, and the next quarterly meeting will be held on April 19. The Detroit People’s Food Co-op, 8324 Woodward, is open every day from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Editor’s Note: Jena has been a member of the Detroit People’s Food Co-op since 2020.
