After a nearly five-year effort, the current board of the Kingston Food Co-op (KFC) revealed at its August meeting that plans to open a flagship grocery store at the old Honda dealership building at 708 Broadway in Midtown Kingston have been abandoned.
“Communication went out last week to members,” said Victoria Fuchs, formerly the capital project manager and now general project manager, “to inform them of just what the situation has been.”
Co-op treasurer Dr. Sway Rosario-Kaliz said the process of reimbursing those members who want their money back will begin in December. Communications lead Siobhan DuPont put the total number of people who bought into the plan to bring a cooperatively owned grocery store into the food desert of Midtown Kingston at 1263. So far, the co-op is reported to have raised $134,695 from its members.
When it was time to open the floor for member questions, one of those members asked the question on everyone’s mind. “How did this happen?” asked a member named Karen, “that it was decided that the building is not feasible? And why did it take so long?”
Board chair board Keyvious Avery, who has a disconcerting habit of laughing while relaying bad news, said it really boiled down to two things.
“Either [the delivery trucks] would have to cut through the residential neighborhood of Elmendorf,” said Avery, “or we couldn’t accommodate their turn radius without drastically decreasing our store size …. But if we decreased our retail space, we no longer have a store that could stand on its own financially. Nor do we think it would be appropriate to cut through a residential zone for that heavy shipping.”
A message the board posted to Facebook said that the project was “faced with code compliance issues on multiple fronts.”
That the disqualifying problems of the project only came to light over the last six months of what has been an almost five-year process has baffled members.
According to Jacqueline Hannah, a co-op development specialist with the non-profit group Food Co-Op Initiative, it requires on average four to seven years to open a food co-op. Hanna reserved special attention to the second phase an aspiring co-op grocery store must pass through on the way to implementation
“Possibly the longest stage for most startups,” said Hannah, “is feasibility and planning.”
The KFC’s twelve-member steering committee began in April 2018 to put into words the mission to provide locally sourced foods from a cooperatively run, fair and equitable community grocery store. It decided shares would be available at various price points in consideration of available financial resources. Those particularly burdened and struggling economically could purchase a solidarity share for as little as $15 for the year. A regular share would cost $150, and members were encouraged to review their advantages and contribute more if they could afford it.
A year later, the co-op officially filed articles of incorporation and began selling shares.
Investing in the enterprise
On May 8, 2019 local philanthropist Peter Buffett purchased the building right next to the Broadway Bubble on Broadway through his Novo Foundation. The old Honda dealership on a quarter-acre parcel offered more than 10,000 square feet, 6000 of which would be used for retail space. The building was purchased with the understanding that it would be handed over to the co-op when full-scale renovations had been completed.
In April 2020, membership had climbed to 500 members. By January 2021, KFC reported 1000 members, the target predicted after which the store could open.
“It will have lots of rows of shelves with grocery items,” predicted founding member Katy Kondat. “A deli, a bakery, and everything we need to be a one-stop-shop for folks in and around Kingston.”
Fresh produce, bulk items, grocery staples, meat, dairy, frozen, deli, and wellness items.
Owning a share meant that a member was invested in the enterprise so that everyone who shopped there would have access to more affordable food, Kondat explained. “In a cooperative model, the profits are returned to the owners,” she said, “and the owners are the shoppers. And so if the idea is not to be making an enormous amount of profit to be returned to the investors, who are not necessarily the shoppers … by remembering that the profits are going back to the shoppers, we can keep the prices more affordable. There’s not really an incentive to be hiking the prices way up.”
Of course, after paying employees and managers, purchasing foodstuffs, the dividends yielded would be modest, often realized at other co-ops as price cuts on specific items.
“In a cooperative model, the profits are returned to the owners,” continued Kondat, “and the owners are the shoppers. And so if the idea is not to be making an enormous amount of profit to be returned to the investors, who are not necessarily the shoppers, one of the benefits… by remembering that the profits are going back to the shoppers, we can keep the prices more affordable. There’s not really an incentive to be hiking the prices way up.”
Project put on pause
Another two years came and went. The co-op shareholders waited to walk through the doors and see for themselves just what a model of cooperation looked like, versus the typical profit-driven model such as that on display at Hannaford’s in the Kingston Plaza.
They waited longer. It took seven months to find out there was nothing they were waiting for after all.
“We did get an initial budget, an initial cost estimate from a different contractor,” said Avery. “A construction firm. However it’s very loose in the details. It’s not very specific. We hadn’t had time to look into those things further, and that’s really what happens in the schematic-design phase, which is what ended up happening in the spring. They actually started to draw things more in depth. We got to get on site and do on-site testing to test the condition of the building, and you start to figure all these things out then.”
According to Avery, the planners went over four different concepts at four different price points. Novo approved $400,000 for the project. The updated budget with all the detail in place was almost twice as high, said Avery. The project was put on pause in the spring.
Avery was elected to his current term in June 2021. His term runs until May 2024.
“The biggest lesson that I’ve learned,” said Avery, “is the deeper you dig the more you know. So, for example, to onboard an architect and on-board different folks to even do a scan of the building to understand what lay underneath, all of that onboarding … had to get started first before we knew what was underneath the building, and so the further we went with the capital-project piece the more we uncovered …. It was just plain expensive.”
A change of direction
Had the renovation gone through, the architect hired to draw up plans, Model of Architecture Serving Society (MASS), was to be paid $500,000. MASS has received $324,000 so far.
Currently KFC has enough money to pay all its members back, should they all request it, though the chair entertains the idea that not all members will. The co-op reports that it has $396,015.51 in its checking balance, a $7,286.20 savings balance, and $56,500 with its fiscal sponsor, GWI.
Short five board members, the KFC board is attempting to salvage the mission of the co-op and to redirect it. What that looks like depends on who you listen to. The KFC intends to maintain its relationship with Novo. In the short term, it is planning an open-air market in pursuit of its mission to bring fresh, healthy food to the community.
“Now where we are,” explained Avery, “is we’ve tried one way of development — that is, pour all of our energy, money and resources into a building and get it open and see what happens — and now we’re trying a different way, which may be a lot cheaper, a bit more iterative, but allows us to have more confidence in exactly what sort of store we’re trying to open .…”
Fuchs has her own spin.
“We have been always operating with this building in mind conceptually,” she said, “and so it’s been a constraint in itself. So it’s also kind of trying to break the rigidity of how we’ve been looking at this situation to look at other opportunities. We still have every intention of moving forward with a building, just not going into it with the same constrained mindset that was set for 708 Broadway.”
Board member Kendal Parker added a similar perspective.
“This market initiative is us putting the mission first and our community first, rather than being so focused on four walls that make up a building. You know, the cooperative movement and the Kingston food co-op is more than 708 Broadway.”
Communications lead DuPont said clearly what the shareholders wanted to hear.
“I think most members are primarily interested in putting our energy toward a building,” said DuPont, “ and that the mission is to have a building and a food co-op …. The mission statement that I voted for was with the thought that the mission of the food co-op is something that’s organized in a physical, permanent place.”
Would the board commit to finding another building in Midtown? “As of right now,” said Avery, “there are no spaces. It’s all very new to us, so there are no spaces under consideration.”
The board had “some added support coming in with the executive team,” noted Avery. He asked anyone who knew anybody who wanted to be “a part of this very iterative emotional process that is developing,” to feel free to shoot the board the email of that person.
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