The Syracuse Cooperative Market lends a helping hand to local farmers and distributors to benefit the Syracuse community. BY VALEXA DEVITO | PHOTO BY AARON KASSMAN
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hen you think of the word “cooperate,” you may think about mutual benefits and a common goal. Likewise, these phrases embody a consumer cooperative. A cooperative is a community-owned organization that enables its members to contribute to business decisions, access products and services, and share profits and benefits. The Syracuse Cooperative Market is a full-service grocery store working to promote local businesses and make local food products more available to the community. Every time people purchase items at the Coop, money is invested back into the community in the form of wages and local vendor and service utilization, as opposed to when people buy from big corporations. Describing the Syracuse Cooperative Market’s mission, general manager Jeremy DeChario says, “[The Syracuse Cooperative Market] wants to support small-scale agriculture, rather than corporate large-scale crops.” The Cooperative is able to sustain the local economy and benefit the Syracuse community’s well-being by working with local farmers and distributors. Syracuse’s farms are typically small and unable to produce enough goods to meet the 22 | baked
high demand from corporate grocery chains, like Wegmans or Tops. Instead, they maintain their business by selling products at farm stands, farmers markets, and restaurants. Once they are able to produce on a larger scale, they might reach out to the Syracuse Cooperative Market to begin selling their products there. For example, the Syracuse Cooperative Market was local Recess Coffee’s first wholesale account, and, today, its products are stocked and sold at Wegmans daily. Because the Cooperative is a small organization, it is able to take time to communicate directly with local businesses and help them succeed. The Syracuse Cooperative Market further supports local farms by encouraging seasonality and changing its produce offerings to reflect what is being actively grown each season. For example, in the spring, the Syracuse Cooperative Market supplies fiddlehead ferns and ramps, which are wild foliage grown in upstate New York available for only about two weeks every year. As of right now, approximately 40 percent of Syracuse Co-op’s products are local, while the remaining 60 percent (primarily packaged goods) come from national brands. Nonethe-
