Great Basin Community Food Co-op

Our History

How it all began…

Melissa, Eric and Ruby Nixon with Genevieve Morgan and Steve Litsinger at one of the first GBCFCo-op potlucks in 2005

The 25 year-old Washoe Zephyr Food Cooperative closed its doors in Reno, NV around the time that two “higher end” natural and organic national food chains came to town. Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods provided local consumers with organic goods from New Zealand to Hawaii. Their stores were bright, well labeled, well packaged, and inconveniently located in Reno’s corporate South. Despite the magnificent glare that radiated off of Trader Joe’s and Wild Oat’s glossy image many Great Basin residents still longed for lacklusterness of real food dirtied by Nevada soil. Many desired a sense of community and equal ownership that can only be found within food co-ops. Fortunately and unfortunately food security issues were gaining awareness across the nation and with food traveling an average of 1,500 miles from farm to table, Northern Nevadans began to think of solutions.

Melissa and Eric Nixon spearheaded the movement by hosting a meeting on September 14, 2005 for a “Northern Nevada Natural Foods Cooperative”. The turn out was impressive not just in sheer numbers but in diversity as well; local food zealots, health nuts, community healers and builders, and of course plenty of young Reno kids seeking social, political, and global food justice all showed up to initiate the movement. At this meeting the group went around the room introducing themselves along with their personal food interests and current understanding of cooperatives. At the end of the meeting we left our email addresses with Melissa and waited for the details of our next event together . It was at that following meeting that the co-founding group of The Great Basin Community Food Cooperative was formed; Pauline Hamilton, Melissa and Eric Nixon, Amber and Nicole Sallaberry, Sasha Verbillis-Kolp and Geneveive Morgan.

We spent our first few months researching cooperative businesses, cooperative culture, and the steps we needed to take in order to open a cooperative storefront and incorporate in the state of Nevada. Our group learned about buyers club and local farmer Community Supported Agriculture(CSA) programs and decided to try and organize both. We started out by hosting our first community potluck in December 2005 at the Grand Canyon Chicken house. The event was a huge success drawing in over sixty community members and a half a dozen Northern Nevadan farmers. Everyone who attended got excited about the ideas of pooling together our resources for bulk ordering and weekly boxes of fresh local vegetables.

In January 2006 Black Hole Body Piercing donated their garage on S. Virginia St. and we moved in as “The Biggest Little Co-op in the World!!” It was at this dissapointing point in time that our group learned that in order to have a wholesale account with UNFI, the West Coast’s largest natural foods supplier, we also needed to have a business license and a resale license. Fortunately, we had immense support from two community businesses: The Pneumatic Diner and The Interpretive Gardens. Each local partnership donated enough of their time, space and credentials to help us build the co-op community and capital necessary to support our first Buyer’s Club and Great Basin Basket CSA program, June 2006.

The community owned cooperative initiative was beginning to gain numbers in Northern Nevada and within a few more months of hosting potlucks and planning events our group connected with over 250 people who wished to participate in a democratically run local food store. By the middle of the Summer our core group was already talking about the possibility of finding a tiny shop where we could build DIY food-buckets and stock full a couple of domestic refrigerators. Our wishes were granted when two passionate Reno food activists, Joe & Mary Ferguson, offered the co-op a the back room of their punk and hardcore record store/collective (Sound & Fury Records). Joe and Mary’s offering was amazingly generous as they refused to accept any rent money for the space until the co-op was well on its feet.

All that we had to begin business with in this back room was approx. $1,800.00 and a donated cash register from Quincy Natural Foods. When word spread of a new Reno food co-op storefront, donations of all types and sizes poured in: domestic refrigerators, sinks, office supplies, paint, the painting of signs, cleaning and other volunteered manual labor were just a few. Thanks to Craigslist we found all of our bulk bins, metro racks, chip carriers, and grocery shelves from Carson City, NV to Folsom, CA. During the construction time period we also decided to accept nominations from the community for our first GBCFC Board of Directors and shortly there after our first governing body was elected. On October 6, 2006 we made fifty copies of our membership application and opened our doors in the back of Sound and Fury Records @ 271 Wonder St. The GBCFC finally got its own account with UNFI natural Foods and we also began purchasing food from our local Nevada Farmers to sell at the co-op.

By late Spring of 2007 we were literally bursting at the seams. The art of shelving grocery items felt like an intense game of Nintendo’s Tetris game… yet we had to pack everything in as tightly as possible in order to avoid running out of inventory by mid-week. Expansion became dire when we started to notice that there were human traffic jams beginning to form at our doorway every Tuesday that we opened for the week . In June 2007 Sound and Fury Record Store collective announced that it was ready to downsize and that the Great Basin Community Food Cooperative was moving into the front part of the store. For over a week the GBCFC co-op volunteers painted, plumbed, shelved, cleaned, constructed and beautified what is now our current site of operations. By not having to pay any rent until the point of our expansion, the GBCFC saved almost $12,000.00 dollars that we used to purchase all new commercial refrigeration and freezer units. We planted a bunch of edible plants in the front of our store, purchased WiFi internet access, liability insurance, metro racks, and received a custom made register table from Darin Bue at Los Verdes Arborists…did I mention that he made it from local recycled wood?

In August of 2007 we legally incorporated as a Cooperative Association in the State of Nevada. To this day we are the only existing food co-op in the state and are proud to announce that this month, June 2008, we adopted the State of Nevada’s first non-hierarchecal member-owner worker’s collective staff model. Yeah!!!

-Amber Sallaberry, July 2008