MARSH Grocery Cooperative celebrates grand opening in Carondelet this Saturday

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Photo by George Mahe

MARSH Grocery Cooperative is hosting a grand opening this Saturday, August 21, from 9 a.m.–6 p.m., at its multi-use space at 6917 S. Broadway in Carondelet.

The event will feature prepared foods from the MARSH kitchen, as well as barbecue from The Fattened Caf and baked goods from Heavenly Sinful Delights and Yellow Moon. There will also be live music from Julio Prato, solo indie pop artist Hennen, and singer-songwriter Big Step, in addition to kid-friendly activities and prizes.

Situated in a space that at one time housed L&S Broadway Café, the worker-owned cooperative grocer, kitchen, and produce garden is a brick-and-mortar extension of an online grocery service that launched a little over a year ago, during the pandemic.

“We’re an urban farm, a worker-owned kitchen, a worker-owned grocery, and a consumer food cooperative, all wrapped into one,” says Beth Neff, who has extensive experience working in co-ops. “We're working really hard in our little corner of the world to figure out how we can set up a different kind of system, one that prioritizes mutual benefit.”

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Courtesy MARSH Cooperative

MARSH worker-owners plan the sliding-scale pricing together.

The Approach

The nonprofit is built around a worker-owned cooperative model, which means ownership is shared and decisions are made democratically and collaboratively. MARSH currently has 175 consumer co-op members and 10 worker-owners who contribute across the grocery, kitchen, and two garden lots.

To achieve their aim, Neff says the MARSH team took two strategic decisions: “We felt the way to do that was to choose a location in a food insecure neighborhood with a tradition of disinvestment, and to operate as a not-for-profit.” 

MARSH Grocery Cooperative has been funded in part by grants from two separate USDA initiatives, the Healthy Food Financing Initiative and the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education. One of the grants was conditional on the project being located in an area designated as food insecure.

Anyone can buy shares in the co-op, but it's not required to shop at MARSH. Shareholders can vote on decisions relating to the management of the co-op, including board elections. Shares cost a flat $100, but there are various subsidy options. Neff says MARSH will also be offering memberships to customers who shop at the store at least 10 times, as well as an option to earn a membership by helping at the store. 

One critical feature is a sliding-scale price system. “We have a price sticker on every item that reflects what it costs us to purchase the food,” Neff says. That includes a small markup to cover the cost of processing payments via credit cards and other payment services. When the customer arrives at the register, they’re given a total, but they can choose whether to pay more or less than the total amount, in accordance with their own ability to pay.

“We provide a suggestion of a range of 10 percent more or 10 percent less, but it is completely within their prerogative to determine how much they want to pay,” Neff says. “And occasionally, people can't pay anything, and that's fine, too. So people do not walk away without groceries.”

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Courtesy MARSH Cooperative

Ishmaia Moore and Adriana Darris, MARSH worker-owners, inside the grocery cooperative in Carondelet

The Menu of Options

The project aims to make shopping for quality groceries and produce accessible to more people in the Carondelet community and neighboring areas.

“For most cooperatives, the tendency has been to provide certain kinds of food–usually natural and organic types of food–to the audience that is basically capable of paying for it,” Neff says. “We wanted to imagine how we could take some of those same principles into consideration, in terms of ecological integrity and nutritional integrity, and apply them in a community and to people who have traditionally not had that access."

“We're growing pretty much everything that can be grown in St. Louis at this time of year,” adds Neff, who at one time owned a farm in Indiana. “We have an abundance of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, melons, sweet corn, and okra; we’re just planting the greens—kale, lettuce, and those types of things—for fall.”

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Photo by George Mahe

In addition to fresh produce, the store stocks a range of other grocery items, including frozen and refrigerated foods, personal care products, and more. The kitchen produces a range of items, including hummus, baba ghanoush, gnocchi, breakfast enchiladas, samsosas, and smoothies. Bread, cookies, muffins, cinnamon rolls, and more are also baked on-site. What the kitchen is making at any given time is partly decided by what ingredients are available and what needs to be used, with sustainability being a guiding principle. Customers can order online for pickup in store; the online store allows filtering for a range of dietary preferences and requirements.

The cooperative is also working on launching easy-to-prepare meal bundles. “We really discovered that the difficulty for most people in eating well is meal-planning,” Neff says. “We want to add a component that makes it possible for people to buy quality foods that maybe only need one or two additional steps of preparation. All the seasoning is in there, the bread is made, and you just have to stick it in the oven.”