The Greene Hill Food Co-op at 18 Putnam Ave. in Clinton Hill is slated to open its storefront to the public this fall after nearly four years of planning. (Photo: Lucas O’Neill)

Reported on Aug. 15, 2011

Had you told DK Holland in 2008 that it would take nearly four years for the Greene Hill Food Co-op to open its doors to the public, she probably would have abandoned the project on the spot.

“If I had known then,” she said, trailing off. “If anyone had known then…”

They didn’t know, however, and as a result the vision of Holland, the president of the Clinton Hill-based food co-operative, is close to coming to fruition. The co-op, which leased space at 18 Putnam Ave. last year, is eyeing a fall opening for its storefront — perhaps as soon as late September.

The aim is to provide access to quality fresh food at affordable prices, a combination that isn’t always readily available in the Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, Prospect Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant communities the co-op expects to draw from.

And when the building, located between Downing Street and Grand Avenue, officially opens, it will mark the final step of what co-op member Anna Muessig describes as a three-phase process.

The first phase started in December 2007, when Holland, who was then a member of the Park Slope Food Co-op, mentioned to The Brooklyn Paper that she was thinking of starting a food co-op in the Fort Greene/Clinton Hill area, where she has lived since 1983. The paper ran an article featuring a photo of Holland and co-founder Kathryn Zarcynski juggling fruit, and in the days that followed some 900 people signed a petition in support of the idea. Weekly meetings soon followed.

“I hate meetings and yet they make me happy because everyone agrees,” said Holland, a writer, designer and activist who sports short auburn and gray hair and a pair of black and neon green-rimmed glasses.

Phase II entailed the creation of a buying club. Co-op members submit their orders online and pick them up on alternating Wednesdays. On a recent pickup day, co-op members came into the Putnam Avenue headquarters between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., handed over their checks and had their orders fulfilled.

Eventually.

A slight woman with shoulder-length brown hair rolled her bright blue eyes as co-op volunteers struggled to fill her order.

About 4 feet behind where the other members sat to process orders stood four white refrigerators and a large freezer adorned with a square of black chalkboard paint. Yellow and pink chalk marked which fridge contains what — lamb, milk, beef, overstock. “Runners” moved from these vessels to a wall of shelves with boxes of produce and other items, grabbing items and comparing them against the order slip.

Unlike Community Supported Agriculture groups, where members get whatever produce the affiliated farm provides any given week, co-op members select the produce, dairy, meat and other products they’d like from vendors, the biggest of which is Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative in Lancaster, Pa.

“You don’t want to act like a New Yorker,” said the woman, who asked not to be quoted saying anything negative about the co-op. “But I don’t want to wait a half hour to have my order filled.”

This is one of the problems with a young co-op. Part of joining means work — sweat capital — and all members are theoretically required to do a four-hour shift every few months, a number that will increase once the storefront opens. On this Wednesday night, however, a couple of people hadn’t shown up, and things were busy.

“This is what happens when people don’t do their shifts,” Holland said at one point.

She later clarified that most members were conscientious, but either way the scene was slightly disorganized, a symptom of the co-op’s main hurdle: a lack of members. It has taken so long to open the storefront because few of those 900 people who initially expressed interest actually signed on.

That means there are fewer people to do the heavy lifting — to plan, attend meetings, stock shelves, fulfill orders, make fliers and do outreach.

Fewer people also means diminished buying power, which is problematic in two respects: First, the co-op isn’t able to get the best bulk prices; second, it’s not able to buy a diverse a range of items, which means fewer choices. There are some: Sweet Ella’s peanut butter is $4.61, versus $3.71 for a comparably sized jar from Peanut Butter & Co.

But for potential members who might not want — or be able to afford — only grass-fed meat, for instance, this could be a deterrent.

“We don’t have enough inventory to have different price points,” said Aaron Zueck, a tall and trim man with short-blond hair and a beard who was fulfilling orders while simultaneously answering a reporter’s questions.

The co-op is running into something of a Catch-22, Zueck said, where the store isn’t open, so people are less likely to join and people aren’t joining because the store isn’t open.

All of these factors explain why outreach has been a priority in each of the three phases, but especially now. Currently, the co-op is in the midst of what it calls the +1 Project, for which each member is encouraged to find a counterpart to join. As part of those efforts, Greene Hill will host a community day on Aug. 27 with face painting, storytelling, yoga and dance lessons.

Between the +1 program and the news that the storefront will soon open, the Greene Hill Food Co-op is making significant process, according to Muessig, a Minnesota native who co-chairs the outreach committee. At the beginning of the summer, the co-op had about 250 members; by mid-August, that number had climbed to 425.

“We knew they were there all along,” she said. “As soon as the project became real to them, people started to come out en masse.”

The goal is to get to 700 by the time the storefront opens. Who those members are is important, however. While some people join the co-op simply to get a break on good food, for others there are additional considerations. There is a desire, for instance, to attract long-time residents, people of color and those from a variety of socioeconomic groups who are often underserved when it comes to reasonably priced, quality food.

Bedford Stuyvesant is considered a food desert, or a place devoid of any meaningful access to quality groceries. And Fort Greene has a number of markets, Muessig said, but often they are expensive.

While Clinton Hill has the bodegas and specialty shops, it also has a supermarket that has stood just two blocks from the Greene Hill location for more than 43 years. Rocky Widdi’s father, Wakeem, opened the Met Foods Supermarket branch at 991 Fulton St. in 1967, and since Rocky took over, he has expanded the selection to better serve a neighborhood that, according to Census figures, has seen an influx of young, mostly white professionals during the past decade.

Half of the produce is now organic, and the store carries an ever-increasing selection of all-natural foods. It remains a neighborhood fixture, Widdi said from his office overlooking the store’s interior last week, and the co-op doesn’t really affect him.

“The co-op is nice, but it does nothing for the economy,” he said. “It doesn’t provide jobs. It doesn’t provide taxes. It doesn’t provide anything.

“You save a few pennies, but then you gotta spend three hours a month there.”

But sometimes it’s more than pennies. The same jar of Peanut Butter & Co. that the co-op sold for $3.71 was $4.99 at Met. That can add up. The co-op has worked with the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, parent-teacher associations and City Councilwoman Letitia James’ office to spread the word.

“They are making all efforts to make outreach to entire community,” James said of the co-op in an email. “It is about education, marketing, outreach, convenience, product diversity and cost.”

On that last piece, a central tool in food access initiatives for low-income communities is the acceptance of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, which deliver public nutritional assistance (formerly food stamps), and Greene Hill recently added this option. Indeed, personal checks and EBT cards are the only forms of payment accepted. Cash is avoided for safety reasons, credit cards because of fees.

The co-op also offers a variety of membership plans: The standard (“lettuce”) plan includes a $150 investment and a $25 administrative fee, but the “apple” plan only requires $5 up front, with the $150 investment spread out over five years. Between those is the “carrot” plan, which requires $25 up front and the $150 paid, in $25 installments, during the course of a year. Nearly a hundred of the current members utilized the carrot plan, while seven joined through the apple program, according to co-op member Nick Collins.

“We really are building a very diverse group of people — racially, economically and in terms of what different people want out of the food co-op,” Muessig said.

And if the altruistic motivations aren’t enough, there is what Holland described as a selfish but universal impetus: everyone wants good food for cheap.