Organic food co-op to reopen

Wild Sage of La Montinita Co-op store team leader Tim Hankins moves boxes of groceries around before putting in shelves Thursday afternoon. The Co-op should open next week. (Photo by John A. Bowersmith/Independent)

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — For those of you who've had a hard time feeding your hunger for organic food and produce since the Wild Sage People's Market shuttered its doors in late December, your troubles will soon be over.

Next week, Gallup's only food cooperative will be opening its doors once again; however, it will be at 105 East Coal Avenue, a few blocks east of its former home. On your way in, you'll notice a new name above the doors. Not a new name, really, so much as a modified one: Wild Sage-La Montanita.

As you step into the store, a little bigger than the one you may remember from its days by 3rd Street, you might ask yourself: Who is La Montanita, and what is she doing above the door?

As it turns out, she's an Albuquerque-based food co-operative that very likely saved your store from extinction.

Placing her name above the door, then, might strike you as a fair concession.

If La Montanita hadn't come along, said Sharon Barefoot, Wild Sage's former board president, "there's a very good chance" that the new store would not be opening at all.

Despite its members' commendable efforts, Wild Sage, Barefoot explained, turned into a victim of its own design and size.

"We were having some financial difficulties and just struggling because we were strictly volunteer based," she said.

And being volunteer based, with not enough volunteers for their store to keep regular hours, the co-op began to suffer. And with membership somewhere above 200, it was having a hard time stocking its shelves cost effectively.

Barefoot says La Montanita tried to help out by sending one of its people to Gallup to run the store. But that was an unsustainable, money-losing option for La Montanita since it wasn't seeing any of the store's profits; so it didn't last.

By September, the Wild Sage board decided it was time to merge.

Robin Seydel, La Montanita's marketing director, sounds excited about the opportunity, which will give her co-op its third store in the state and its first outside of Albuquerque.

Because her co-op has only paid workers a legal requirement because of its size the store won't have to worry about keeping regular store hours for the lack of volunteers. And being a much larger co-op 7,000 members in Albuquerque it can cut costs by buying in bulk more than Wild Sage ever could on its own.

The annual membership fee will also drop from $20 to $15. And with a larger store, they'll have a wider variety of goods to chose from. In fact, Seydel said, the 105 East Coal location will probably be the co-op's Gallup home for only a few years until it can find an even larger space.

Although merging for Wild Sage meant dissolving its board, said Barefoot, its members will have the chance to run for spots on La Montanita's board.

A co-operative, as Seydel put it, "is an association of individuals that have a shared ownership in a community business."

That ownership comes with your $15 membership.

"It's a pooling of resources to benefit the common good," she said.

In addition to focusing on supplying the masses with organically grown foods and food products, she said, a co-op's goal is to support local growers and the local community by keeping the profits in the community rather than sending them to far-removed corporate headquarters and shareholders.

Seydel says that 20 percent of everything La Montanita stocks its shelves with is produced in New Mexico, a figure the co-op is trying to raise by 3 percent every year.

And any revenue left over at the end of the year after all the bills are paid, she said, are spread among the members. It could be thought of as the co-op's equivalent of the corporate dividend, she said, except that the co-op members have to shop at its stores to benefit, and the more they shop the more they get back. And since the members are from the area not necessarily so for corporate shareholders the returns stay in the area.

It all comes down to the co-op's simple mantra, Seydel says: "What's good or the co-op is good or the community, and what's good or the community is good for the co-op, and that's really what we're about."

Seydel said the co-op is aiming for a Tuesday grand opening, and will have people working through the weekend to get it ready. But with little more than bare walls and the food still in buckets piled on top of one other in the middle of the room with no shelves to put them on as of Thursday afternoon, it could take a few extra days.