January Feedback Responses 2023

Comment:

PLEASE don’t tell me that the Co-op has stopped carrying Clover ice cream and Mrs. Renfro’s medium salsa!! Don’t make me go to Safeway!

Response:

Clover Ice cream has been discontinued by the manufacturer. UNFI disco’d Mrs Renfro’s medium salsa, I will bring it back via SuperValu

Comment:

As a 30+ year member I’m sad the Co-op was hit so badly by the recent storms and was out of power for almost a week. (So glad we are back up and running.) That must be devastating financially and wonder if it would help (maybe a drop in the bucket?) if owners give back/donate our owner rewards? We love our Co-op and want it to thrive! If there’s any other way we could help, I’m sure lots of us would step up if the Co-op lets us know what we can do. I said “yes” to a response but it really isn’t necessary to respond to this suggestion unless it would not drain resources (time/person power) away from where it is more needed. Thanks!

Email Response:

 “Thank you for reaching out to us about our power outage and for your generous offer to help by donating. Fortunately, we are currently in a strong enough financial position and have prepared for instances such as this so donations will not be necessary. Thank you once again for your offer to help and kind words for the store!”

Comment:

Hi! I’ve got a few questions about the weekly specials and how they match with the goals and mission of the Coop, using the January 4-10 ones (attached) as an example. One of the stated ends of the Coop is “Buying local produce ensures freshness and a high quality product for Owners and customers that are focused on purchasing healthy foods. Local produce is also more healthy for the planet as a whole since the food traveled less, which means less gas and packaging used during the process of getting on to our shelves.” We’ve got a lot of great local farmers which should help make this easy to do. Yet the produce specials often feature out of season produce, which is not highlighting the best local produce. And when it is local, while I appreciate the “local” emblem often included on the weekly ad, why not shout out the farmer(s) that grew it? Specific to the January 4 ad – where are you getting local tomatoes and zucchini from in January? Local growers in Yolo, Solano, and Sacramento counties only grow these in summer.

Email Response: 

“Thank you for your feedback regarding our weekly specials at the Co-op. As you mentioned, featuring local produce and other products is of top priority to us and is something we have put a great deal of focus back into over the past year or so. As far as having more local produce highlighted in our weekly specials, that is a decision our Produce Manager would be able to make so I have forwarded your feedback over to her.

In regards to the zucchini and heirloom tomatoes in last week’s flyer, they were marked local because they are technically sold to us from a local distributor so they have the “local” designation in our system. When our graphic designer was pulling that info to make this flyer, he must have seen that and assumed that meant that the farm was local. While that comes from a place of understandable confusion, I do agree that these items should not carry that same local designation if they are not from a local farm so that is something that will be changed moving forward.

Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions and thank you again for your feedback.”

Comment:

I have always purchased my jasmine rice here in the bulk section. It has always had a wonderful aroma. However, during the end of Dec and up until today, it has NO aroma. Do you know why?

Response:

Mike H, our Bulk Specialist, said we have been ordering the same Lundberg Jasmine rice for a long time and he is not sure why the aroma would change, possibly Lundberg is getting the rice from a new farm.

We always seem to be out of:

Amy’s Veggie Spinach cheese pizza

Response:

It’s a fast seller. The Co-op will make sure and keep an extra case in backstock

Comment:

Expand the accessibility adjustments provided by accessiBe to include the curbside pickup.

Email Response: 

“Thank you for reaching out through our suggestion box in regards to the accessibility features of our Curbside Pickup site. As you noticed, we have them on our main website but not on our Curbside site. That is because we unfortunately do not have control over our Curbside site as it is a feature from our POS provider rather than a site we have built and host ourselves. Because of that, the accessibility features would need to be added by them on the backend. However, this is definitely something I will pass along to our IT Manager who has a direct relationship with them and can get some clarity around when those features can or will be introduced.”