FROM THE GENERAL MANAGER

Dear Co-op Customers,

Our recent Customer Survey yielded an assortment of topics for us to discuss. Thank you to everyone who took time to complete it, we appreciate your input. 

Our last survey was in 2015, the main theme, the only theme, was pricing. In this survey, it was refreshing to see that majority of our customers are satisfied with our pricing. We dedicated a lot of time to reducing prices across the store. Your input helped us change in the right direction!

We haven't analyzed all of the responses just yet but the common themes in this years comments were hot deli food and finances. 

DELI FOOD
Unfortunately, due to fire code, we cannot use our current cooking system to prepare hot foods at the volume we did in the past. In fact, we had to get creative just to keep producing our hot breakfast sandwiches, burritos, and soups. Moving forward we must decide if we want to upgrade our kitchen in order to get back to that volume of prepared foods. We know that our food offerings were popular in our community and it was a sad day for us when we closed the hot bar. If you have suggestions for food you'd like to see again, please let us know! We do offer local, certified organic greens from 24 Carrot Farm in our salad bar, and we will add more LOCAL produce as the season progresses.

FINANCES
I invite you to attend one of our Quarterly Owner Meetings, as well as our Annual Meeting & Luncheon in October, to hear about the co-ops finances. We talk about other work the co-op is doing and these meetings are a great time to hear about operational changes and ask questions (as opposed to a Board Meeting). Part of being a coop member/owner is having access to this important information.

Our fiscal year ends June 30, 2018, so we're preparing for our year end now. We have had three consecutive profitable quarters, which as most of you know, is new for us. We have made many significant changes in the last few years and it is reassuring to know that we're on the right track. We're seeing sales growth and profitability! We're finally out of the red and being in the black means we can focus on strategic planning, outreach, and other exciting new directions for the co-op. Please join us as we enter into this new phase of (y)our co-op! Thank you for your patience and continued support as we grow out of start-up mode and into our full potential as a cooperatively-owned, community supported business.

We will gather information from the survey and share the data with you at our Annual Meeting in October.

As always, contact me directly if you have questions or input. I truly enjoy chatting with customers about what's going on at the co-op.

In cooperation,
Regina MIranda
gm@placervillecoop.org