If you’ve shopped your Co-op, or any co-op, you’ve probably used a gravity dispenser or had your mitts in a scoop bin at one point in one of our Bulk aisles. We know that this area of the store supplies many of our Owners with vital components for their meal-making, and we put a lot of thought into what lives there and how we make it accessible to you. We also know that the many of the offerings in the Bulk aisle are ones that you all have been shopping for years and years. It is a constant and reliable set of products in this ever-changing business of groceries. For this reason, we thought it prudent to loop our Owners into some recent developments around our Bulk aisle offerings.
Changes
In addition to the two dispensation methods I mentioned above, many of you also enjoy purchasing product from our Willy Pack set—the products that we deem too expensive or inconvenient to be drawn from bins. These are the dried fruits, nuts, and candies that you find on our Bulk aisle shelves packaged in clear bags with green tape and Willy Street Co-op labels on them. Sliced mangoes, Thompson raisins, tamari almonds, fruit juice-sweetened cranberries, and many other favorites come packaged to you in this fashion. It is a group of products that many rely on for healthful snacking, baking and meal-making. We intend to continue to have it on offer for you, albeit with some changes that we’d like to apprise you of beforehand.
What we’ve come to realize is that this set of product has grown over time to over 60+ items that we need to package in-house at our Production Kitchen. To maintain the shelves for these products, this is often requiring between 300 and 500 pounds of product to be packaged each day and many times that to be stored, awaiting packaging. The short of it—we’ve run out of space. To combat this, we shipped the packing program over to Willy North upon its opening, to leverage some space in that footprint. Unfortunately, that has proven to be insufficient as well.
New packaging
Which has brought us to the time of this writing. We have chosen to move forward by returning the packing program to our Production Kitchen albeit in a smaller capacity. This means that the top 15 to 20 products will still come to you packaged just like you’re used to having them. Another 20 to 30 products will be sourced from the manufacturers or vendors pre-packaged already, which means you will be seeing different (and, in some cases, lower) prices, sizes and package styles. Yet another group of these products will likely be cut altogether as they are the slowest movers that we’ve determined through careful examination.
This is going to be a rather large change in what has been an extremely reliable and constant set of products in our stores. We want you to know that you can rely on our floor staff to assist you in finding what you need even amongst the unfamiliarity that this change will bring. Please, don’t hesitate to provide feedback through Customer Comment cards. We will be monitoring the situation so as to make tweaks and adjustments. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
