Getting wholefoods at cost price or near

Trow

I am a member of a wholefood co-op. We get together twice a year to place orders with suma (www.suma.co.uk) which we pay at cost plus 1.5% to pay for admin fees (there is always something to post, paper to buy, stamps required etc).

It might be worth seeing if there is anything like that locally, alternatively why don't you get together with some mates and start one of your own - if you do chances are you will be in some ways better off than the association I am in as we live in the FAR north and have to order over £1,300 for free delivery - the order required for free delivery will be much smaller in most areas.

Ours was initially advertised in out local doctors surgery - health food shops would work also, in order to get people interested if you need more bodies.

It takes a bit of organisation, and bear in mind that most things are ordered in bulk sizes - eg 1 kg of apricots, 3kg of rice etc, but the prices for most things are good and you buy for 3/6 months at a time. Might mess up the groery challenge initially, but you can always proportion the cost per month!

Suma sell catalogues either on paper or on floppy disc. It is a good idea to get a paper one certainly initially as you can get a better idea of what is available, personally I always order from the disk as I am less likely to buy on impulse! The catalogue prices are valid for a two month period, so it is a good idea to get the catalogues at the start of the period and make sure the order goes in within it - otherwise you can find that prices have gone up or down.

We have a spreadsheet format that we send out to anyone computer literate to complete with the details from the disk catalogue - this gets send back to the 'orderer' with the payment, who then collates the order into one big order and sends it off.

When the order arrives (which is fairly quick) we usually get 4 people together to sort it - our co-op has about 25 members though (in order to get free delivery) and yours can be much smaller. They check off what has arrived and put it in piles for the individual orders, taking note of anything that has not arrived or has arrived in error. Sometimes they will inform in advance is something is out of stock.

Then get in touch with the individuals to collect it, sort out any discrepancies with money (refunding items that did not arrive, collecting payment for any price increases) and thats it effectively done till the next time.

We do have a separate bank account for the association, and a committee etc, with yearly accounts being prepared but that is more because of the size than anything else. If I was in London with 4 or 5 mates I wouldn't bother with that!

Oh - 1 other thing, to start it going we each paid a membership fee of £10, just to have some money in the pot for the first catalogues etc.

I hope this is of help to some of you.

Trow

Trow

If anyone wants more info just ask - I can give examples of prices, email spreadsheets or example price list.