There’s just one problem, and for something called the Manchester Food Co-op it's a big one: the site is in Bedford. The rent per square foot was only a third of some downtown Manchester locations, and much of the equipment they would need – coolers, freezers, lobster tanks, and pizza ovens – were in place already. hmm this seems too good to be true.”Īnother grocery store, Harvest Market, wanted out of the business. “It's just an incredible opportunity,” Ferrara remembers, “and we were thinking. But after a year and a half of looking they found this one spot.

“From then on we were looking at locations and doing all these feasibility studies,” she says.īut Manchester is a crowded town, and the co-op was struggling to find a location with parking, with good exposure, reasonable rent. She says it took years of planning and outreach to attract 1,000 members putting in $100 each to get the project started. it's a huge long process,” says Carla Ferrara, the co-op's Secretary. Now, the Manchester Food Co-op is planning a grand opening this year after nearly seven years of planning and fundraising. When the Manchester Food Co-op was proposed in 2009, the idea was to bring a store that sold fresh, healthy food into a place that is what's known as a food desert – as in nothing for miles around except convenience stores selling ho-hos.

It's your community, you own it,” says Sarah-Marie Cole, president of the Manchester Food Co-op's board, “It's all the good feel-good things about the community.” Creating a food co-op is a labor of love.

Harvest market bedford new hampshire