BED-STUY FRESH & LOCAL
REGENERATIVE QUALITIES OF BED-STUY FRESH & LOCAL
Robust Circulatory Flow/Honors Community & Place/Empowered Participation
Robust Circulatory Flow/Honors Community & Place/Empowered Participation
Sheila Akbar and Dylan Ricards opened the doors of Bed-Stuy Fresh & Local in December 2013 with an abundance of passion but no experience in the grocery business, responding to a need they perceived for fresh, healthy, and affordable food in their neighborhood. Unlike the kind of mini-Whole-Foods clone you see in many gentrifying neighborhoods of New York City, what Sheila and Dylan have created in the past three years goes far beyond bringing fresh produce to the corner of Patchen Avenue and Macon Street. That’s because Bed-Stuy Fresh & Local was conceived, with great intentionality, as an inclusive community anchor that supports the local food system and where newcomers and long-time residents feel welcome in a rapidly gentrifying corner of North-Central Brooklyn. “Customers have a sense of home, not just a shopping experience, when they come here,” says Jules Cunningham, an employee. Fresh & Local will soon be, with equally deliberate intention, something even greater than a community-gathering place. The store will soon convert to cooperative-ownership, enabling wealth to be shared more equitably with the store’s new worker-owners, and, in time, to be more effectively captured and circulated locally.
|
Becoming a cooperatively owned enterprise rather than a traditional, privately owned one was something Sheila and Dylan had contemplated for their new generation mom and pop grocery when it was initially launched. However, they quickly ran into the usual startup financing obstacles. “No bank would fund us even though we had perfect credit and a good business plan,” Sheila reports, “They were uncomfortable lending into gentrifying areas, let alone to a cooperative.” The two ended up raising the needed funds through an Indiegogo campaign, from friends and family, and by assuming personal debt.
But their dream of cooperative ownership for the store was rekindled last year when they began attending a free, 12-week cooperative-ownership workshop co-sponsored by The Working World and The Northeast Brooklyn Housing Development Corporation. They eagerly shared what they were learning with two of their employees: Jules, who had previous experience as a cafe owner, and Christina Thomas, who had started out as an intern through a not-for-profit youth employment organization called Exalt. |
Sheila Akbar and Dylan Ricards
|
The Collaboration with Working World In August 2015 Working World extended a $60,000 loan to refinance the store’s startup debt. “It is basically a profit-sharing agreement we have with Working World,” Sheila explains. “On a monthly basis we pay them some percent of profits after expenses. We feel like they are our partners as opposed to our lender.” Over these past nine months, Working World staff has visited the store on an almost weekly basis to meet with Sheila, Dylan, Jules, and Christina. They are reviewing the store’s finances and guiding the soon-to-be cooperative owners through the conversion process. Working World has also offered other advisory support. “We have run into crisis points where we feel our customer base is dropping off,” Sheila reports, “and they get into the trenches with us to fix the problem. They bring their own business knowledge and connect us with other people in similar businesses. They have offered us moral support in so many ways.” Working World will extend additional financing once the cooperative is a legal entity to enable Jules and Christina to finance their share purchases. The debt will be structured to allow the new co-owners to pay it down over time from their profits in the business. Sheila and Dylan had never been comfortable with a hierarchical employee/employer relationship and consequently they anticipate the transition to a cooperative model will be a smooth one. “Jules and Christina have both been with us for two years and it is really exciting to be offering worker ownership to them,” Sheila reports. Bed-Stuy Fresh & Local is now doing all it can to support a worker-owner-cooperative culture in Brooklyn and the surrounding boroughs of New York City. |
Sheila now serves on the board of the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives and Dylan is a member of the Bed-Stuy Cooperative Steering Committee. A Bed-Stuy exterminator service, an organics packaging facility, and a child-care center are all in early stages of cooperative conversion through the support of this network and through funding from a cooperative initiative of the New York City Council.
|
Extending a Welcome to Everyone in a Gentrifying Neighborhood
Creating an inclusive atmosphere for the store was something that Sheila and Dylan thought a lot about from the very beginning. Sheila notes: “We wanted to be sure we weren’t being seen as excluding anyone or serving only the new population.” Indeed many of the new businesses in Bed-Stuy are relatively high-priced bars and restaurants clearly catering to the hipster population or affluent young families who have recently moved to the neighborhood and are renovating brownstones. Bed-Stuy Fresh & Local is an enrolled participant in the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program for low-income individuals and households. And to keep prices affordable, the store adds a standard margin—roughly 33 percent—on its products, even though many stores selling the same products add more than that. “It’s been tough,” Sheila admits, “but we try to look for efficiencies wherever possible so that our overhead is as low as possible.” Fresh & Local is very much a neighborhood store, with patrons coming from only a four or five block radius. It periodically holds a “supper club” featuring local chefs and food producers. “We have made great friends with people living here 20 years or more, as well as with newcomers,” Sheila reports, “It is a great thing to see neighbors talking to each other in the store. It feels like we are participating in a real community.” Sheila admits that gentrification is hard to arrest as affordable housing becomes scarcer in Brooklyn, but she feels Bed-Stuy Fresh & Local is doing its small part to address it by becoming a worker-owned coop. |
“Instead of offering slightly more than minimum wage jobs, which are great, but not that great, we are allowing people to become owners,” Sheila says. “That changes who owns the capital in our community and where money goes in the neighborhood. So that is where we can help make the change happen.”Supporting the Local Food Network
Fresh & Local has fast become part of a growing local food network; for example, selling specialty food items produced by neighborhood entrepreneurs including Gustavo’s Salsa and FilFil Hot Sauce. As these businesses have grown and accessed larger food supply networks themselves, they’ve shared their network knowledge with the store. Fresh & Local now sources some frozen produce from Hudson Valley Harvest, which aggregates and distributes from 50 Hudson Valley Farms. The store also hosts a local CSF through Fulton Fish Market and sources its cheeses from Food Matters Again. Fresh & Local is also planning to buy bags from another Working World client, LUV Custom Prints. Waste is minimized wherever possible. Slightly wilted but still fresh produce goes into the store’s homemade soups and smoothies. Juice pulp and other scraps are composted with a local community garden. Looking into the future the worker-owners of Fresh & Local have ambitions to grow, with plans to create satellite locations in Bed-Stuy and other underserved areas of Brooklyn. As they gain more expertise in running a holistic values-based food business, and a cooperatively owned one at that, Fresh & Local is poised to become a key player in the regeneration of the New York City food economy. |
Meet Two, Soon-to-be Bed-Stuy Fresh & Local Worker-Owners
Jules Cunningham
I lived on Macon Avenue three years ago, and I saw this place opening up and somehow I knew I wanted to be a part of it. Dylan was looking for part-time help. I had been in the restaurant industry and had owned my own café. I started out working only 10 hours a week and fell in love with this place. Now two years later it’s become my every day thing. I love how we connect with the community. Everything we envisioned this store has become. The customers know my name. We do community outreach. Local people sell their produce here. It is a collaboration of different minds, but everyone has a passion to connect with people. I have a strong culinary background and it is cross-pollinating. I’m educating customers about how to use produce. Some people may not know how to prepare fresh vegetables. I bring them into my kitchen and they bring me into theirs—they take photos of what they cooked and show me how proud they are. This is a neighborhood I knew as a child—I grew up in the 1980s on Jefferson Avenue and moved back in 2008—and to see what has happened, how different it is, the diversity of people who walk through our door, it is great. We want the store to be relatable to everyone. It is how you set your tone. Even the paint you use on the wall. |
Christina Thomas
I grew up in Flatbush and now live in Coney Island. It’s an hour and a half commute. I started as an intern for six weeks with the Exalt program. I took the job seriously. Dylan and Sheila were pleased with my work ethic and hired me full time. It has been nothing but love since then, almost two years. When I was presented with the coop idea it didn't seem that strange because it was almost that already. I love the energy of the store, and the ethics and the morals—supplying fresh local produce and grass-fed meat to a community like Bed-Stuy. And I love making the juices. Figuring out just the right concoction. My job is to make it taste good, and no one has complained yet. I have become the guru of juices! |
AN UPDATE FROM DYLAN RICARDS
Bed-Stuy Fresh and Local is now a worker-owned cooperative! Bed-Stuy Fresh and Local is an organic market whose mission is to strengthen the intersection of food, community and healthy living in Bed-Stuy. We have lots of new offerings in store for 2017, including natural supplements, body care products and an expanded bulk section! Come by and see what we are all about!
|