One day a couple of weeks ago, John Harvie, chief executive officer of Co-op Atlantic, got a call from the front desk of the company’s offices in Moncton, N.B.
The receptionist had a rather unnerving message.
A large, angry man was demanding to see John Harvie.
And he was carrying a ham.
Harvie’s first response, he recalls with a chuckle, was to ask, “are you sure it’s John Harvie he wants to see?”
Plucking up his courage, he went down to meet the man, who turned out to be a local farmer who had driven into Moncton that day with instructions from his wife to buy a ham at the co-op grocery store.
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In his hand he was clutching the ham, which to his dismay and anger came not from New Brunswick or any of the other Atlantic provinces, but from Nebraska.
“It was too much for him to bear,” Harvie said during a presentation to co-op officials from across the country attending a conference in Saskatoon.
The farmer couldn’t understand why a locally owned co-op would stock ham from the United States when there were plenty of pigs being grown at home.
“There were lots of good explanations for it, but I was not able to satisfy him,” said Harvie, adding that as unhappy he was, the farmer eventually went home with the ham because those were his orders.
Harvie was using the story to illustrate the importance for co-ops to forge a direct link between producers and consumers of agricultural products.
“That’s an example of the sort of thing we’re trying not to do,” he told his audience.
Co-op Atlantic is made up of 127 local co-ops with more than 225,000 members and $500 million in annual sales. Food and agriculture are the main businesses, with 100 retail co-ops and 27 farm outlets.
It operates in a highly competitive market, and in an effort to differentiate itself from other grocery stores the co-op has developed a marketing strategy that emphasizes the fact that its membership incorporates the entire supply chain from grower to processor to consumer.
Harvie said the co-op works hard to publicize the special partnership between the people who grow food and the people who eat it.
“There is a wide, wide gulf between the people who produce it and the people who consume it and we’re trying to pull that together with us in the middle,” he said.
He doesn’t believe co-ops have any special responsibility or obligation so sell local products just because they’re local; he just thinks it makes good business sense.
“I think we have the opportunity to do that and I think for the success of our business it’s in our best interests and our members’ best interests to do it,” he said.
One way the co-op tries to establish that link in the consumer’s mind is through its website, which provides biographical sketches and photos of more than 200 farmers from across the region who produce food that’s sold at the co-op’s grocery stores.
The company also wants to adorn co-op trucks with pictures of local farmers, rather than generic pictures of oranges or pizzas.
It’s in partnership with Atlantic Beef Products Inc., a co-operatively owned beef plant in Prince Edward Island, providing a guaranteed market for the plant’s production.
Harvie cautioned that the plant doesn’t necessarily serve as a model for other regions, given that beef production in the Atlantic region is so small and there are no other markets for local producers.
Two years ago the co-op organized a symposium to bring together beef producers and meat managers from its retail grocery stores.
“It was the first time ever those two groups, who are so dependent on one another, had been invited to attend the same meeting at the same time,” Harvie said in an interview after his presentation.
Producers and retailers generally don’t like each other very much, but once they got together they realized they had a lot of shared interests and concerns.
“Yes, we can bring the producer and the consumer closer together, but we have to be consistent, focused and determined,” he said.
“You can’t just do it once and then forget about it, it has to be a way of life.”
During a question period following his presentation, one audience member said co-ops should do more to encourage the consumption of locally grown products, while another complained that too many consumers are simply looking for the cheapest price with no thought about farmers or local economies.
Harvie said regardless of what co-ops might like to do, they have to operate according to the dictates of the marketplace if they want to survive. If competitors are able to bring in products from outside the region at a cheaper price, it presents a difficult challenge for the co-op that may want to give preference to local products
Ultimately, he said, it’s the consumer who has the power.
“If they don’t buy it, we won’t stock it, and if they do we will.”
