Shownotes
About The Show:
“I'm going to work for the community, and I'm going to help build this business”.
- Mike Anzalone
In this episode, host Randy Wilburn talks to Mike Anzalone, whose connection to Ozark Natural Foods Co-Op began in childhood. Mike's health-conscious mother used to drive to great lengths just to shop at the Co-Op, little knowing that her son would one day play a pivotal role in the same organization.
After honing his skills at Trader Joe's and returning to Arkansas, Mike joined the Co-Op as a retail manager. Unbeknownst to him at the time, this was the same place that had left a lasting impression on him as a child. Mike's passionate leadership helped transform the Co-Op from a modest store into a thriving community hub, boasting its largest membership to date.
Mike's journey is not just a career story; it's a testament to the power of community and the cooperative business model. His relentless dedication to serving the Co-Op members has had a lasting impact, not only enriching his own life but also touching the lives of countless others in the community. Tune in to hear more about Mike's inspiring tale and the transformative power of committed leadership.
What You Will Learn In This Episode:
- Unearth the perks and member-driven nature of the cooperative business framework.
- Explore the rich history and growth of Ozark Natural Foods Co-Op.
- Realize the impact of supporting hometown farmers and the local economy.
- Gain insights into navigating industry shifts and overcoming competition hurdles.
- Delve into methods for broadening outreach and mitigating rural food scarcity.
All this and more on this episode of Ozark Natural Foods The Co-Op Podcast.
Important Links and Mentions In This Episode:
- Visit Ozark Natural Foods store in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
This Episode is Sponsored By:
Connect More With Ozark Natural Foods:
- Grab our Newsletter
- Email Us at Info@ONF.Coop
- Connect With Our Facebook Page
- Join The Facebook Group
- Connect With Our Instagram
- Connect With Our LinkedIn Page
- Learn more about the History of Food Coops
We get by with a little help from our Co-Op Members and Friends!
Please consider rating and reviewing our podcast on Apple Podcasts or your Podcast player of choice. A little Love goes a long way.
Transcripts
ONF PODCAST - MIKE ANZALONE
Open ONF [:Welcome to Ozark Natural Foods. The Coop Podcast featuring stories and information about the largest food Coop in Arkansas. Based in Fayetteville and serving all of Northwest Arkansas, the Coop has been around for 50-plus years, providing community and encouraging a love of food that is good for us and our planet. Learn our history and standards of quality. Meet our Coop members, employees, and vendors, and understand why being locally focused is vital to our food, products, and economy. The Coop has leveraged Cooperative economics here in Northwest Arkansas to bring the freshest and the best food to our whole community. Listen to Ozark Natural Foods, the Coop Podcast today to learn why.
Randy Wilburn [:Welcome to the ONF Coop podcast. I'm your host Randy Wilburn, and we have a great episode in store for you today. We are sitting down with Mike Anzalone to learn more about his history and background with the Ozark Natural Foods Coop, and more importantly, what it's been like to be the general manager here at Ozark Natural Foods. Mike, how are you doing?
Mike Anzalone [:I'm doing great.
Randy Wilburn [:The first thing I want you to do is I want you to tell our audience just a little bit about yourself and how you got connected with the Coop. And I know you have some history with the Coop. I'm eager to learn more about that.
Mike Anzalone [:Yeah, I do. It goes way back. When I was a kid, we lived in Russellville and we lived in Greenwood, and Coop was still very new, but my mom was sort of new to the health food industry, and she was really interested in finding better food than was available at the time. And so she used to drive up, I think it was probably ‘81 or ‘82, she would drive up from Russellville and then from Greenwood, and it was just to buy brown rice and yogurt. And somehow she had found out how much more nutritious brown rice is than white rice. And nobody knew what yogurt was, and people thought she was crazy, but she would do that. She would drive all the way up, and that was our introduction to our food Coop.
Randy Wilburn [:Yeah. So she didn't even know what a Coop was before that.
Mike Anzalone [:I don't even think she knew about the business model. I think she just knew that this was the one place where she could get those things. And she would drive up about once a month and pick up those items and go back down, and she probably picked up a couple of other things, but those were the two main things. She knew that yogurt was healthy for you, and she knew that rice was a better alternative, and so, that's what she did. She was willing to make that drive up once a month so that we could have these things in our diet. And as the years went by, she became more and more involved in the health food movement and whatever was the latest information about healthy food she was always up on that. And so as she learned, our diets changed and it all started at our Coop.
Randy Wilburn [:When you think of it, today, we kind of take for granted how easy it is to drive down to Russellville but this was pre Bobby Hopper tunnel. You had to really want to come to the Coop to drive from Russellville up to Fayetteville.
Mike Anzalone [:From Russellville, she was probably taking the pig trail.
Randy Wilburn [:Yes, absolutely.
Mike Anzalone [:And, from Greenwood, she was probably taking Old 71 and neither of those were for the faint of heart. That was a tough drive.
Randy Wilburn [:That's my understanding. I think that's like the perfect introduction to the whole Coop business model. And you ended up after matriculating through college and prep school and everything, you ended up in a grocery store environment.
Mike Anzalone [:Yeah, that's right. So I left Arkansas right before my senior year, and I finished my education in Massachusetts and then moved to the West Coast for many years. And while I was there, one of the jobs that I had for quite a while was working with Trader Joe's. I was with them for four or five years. And, when my son turned eleven, I ended up getting full custody of him. We were living in Los Angeles at the time, and I didn't really want to raise him in Los Angeles. I wanted to raise him at home. So we moved back to Arkansas and he loved it. It was great for him. I just wasn't quite sure what I was going to do here. And so I was sort of lumbering around trying to find what job I would find that would be fulfilling. And then I heard about this retail manager position at Ozark Natural Foods. I didn't even put the two together that that was the place my mom used to go when I was a kid. It just seemed like a good fit. It was a very small local grocery store. I had half a decade worth of grocery experience at that point, and I thought it might be good temporarily. At the time when I was hired, I planned on staying with the Coop for a year and as it turns out, about a week from now will be my 16th year at the Coop.
Randy Wilburn [:And so I got to imagine how quickly, once you actually got into the Coop, did it click that this was the same place? Because by the time your mom started going to the Coop, the Coop had been in existence for about a decade, I would imagine. Because it started in ‘71, you said somewhere in the early 80s. That's about a decade. Then you go off to school, you come back, you end up in Northwest Arkansas, and you take a job with the Coop and then it all clicked for you.
Mike Anzalone [:Yeah, I would say like a year or so before my mom and I put the pieces together.
Randy Wilburn [:And really, that long?
Mike Anzalone [:I wasn't really thinking about yogurt and brown rice when I started my new job, but somewhere in the first year, she had sort of asked about the history of the Coop, and I told her some about it and she said, that's the store I used to go to when you were a kid.
Randy Wilburn [:And the thing that I think about when you say that is that because it had moved a number of times.
Mike Anzalone [:It did.
Randy Wilburn [:So I would imagine that when you got there, it was in the new location, the recent new location, which would have been Evelyn Hills Plaza.
Mike Anzalone [:Yeah. When I started, we were in Evelyn Hills. When she was going there, the Coop was sharing a building with the Ozark Cooperative warehouse. And even though those names are very similar, those were two very separate businesses. The warehouse was a wholesale organization and Ozark Natural Foods was a retail organization. And our Coop got most of the products that we sold from their Coop. So it was a good and interesting Cooperative relationship.
Randy Wilburn [:What happened to the Ozark Cooperative warehouse?
Mike Anzalone [:From what I understand, it was Y2K. They had some struggles. They had a difficult time getting products being so small and some of the natural food warehouses were really sort of growing and gobbling up other small regional warehouses. But from what I understand, what really put them under was when the year 2000 was coming, there was, I have to explain this for people who weren't around then. There was this little weird computer thing that people thought everything was going to end when we went from 1999 to 2000.
Randy Wilburn [:We thought we were going to be shuttled back to prehistoric times after the stroke of midnight.
Mike Anzalone [:Nobody knew what was going to happen because all the clocks were going to reset and banks were concerned that bank accounts were going to be closed and all this stuff was going on. But a lot of the people, especially people in the back to land movement, they really thought that they should hunker down for something sort of catastrophic. And so a bunch of people bought a lot of bulk food and so that was really good for the warehouse because they just basically sold out their inventory in the months leading up to the year 2000. And as it turned out, nothing happened. A couple of clocks started blinking and whatever. Really, nothing happened. Life just kept going, but they ran out of customers. All their regular customers had bought six months to a year worth of food and they weren't really in a financial position to deal with not having any income for several months, and so, they went under. Now, this is just a retelling of a retelling so I don't know. You'd have to talk to someone from the warehouse to get the facts but from what I understand, that's what happened is they sold a bunch of wholesale food to all their regular customers for the months leading up. And then business dried up and they couldn't quite hang on until people ate all that food.
Randy Wilburn [:So at that point, for the Coop itself, again, you were in what would be termed a more traditional retail setting there at Evelyn Hills?
Mike Anzalone [:Yes. So when I got there, it was just a grocery store. They had several little funky places that were, as we were growing, that were really fun. There was, of course, the place I just mentioned. The first place that they had was the very back of High Roller Cyclory.
Randy Wilburn [:Yeah, I heard about that.
Mike Anzalone [:Yeah. If you drive up the street and you pass them. You can actually see where there used to be a doorway in the back of High Roller Cyclory that's now bricked in, but it's still visible, and it was just 10ft wide and twelve or 15ft long. And it's when they had just become a Coop, they had just moved out of being a buying club and they stored things there and they would sell products out of the back of the Cyclory and then they moved. Now, I might get some of the moves here wrong, but as far as I can remember, they moved in with the warehouse which was right across the street from Scarpinos, where Scarpinos is and Arsega's Depot. And then they moved across the street to a place that was right next to Scarpinos. It doesn't exist any longer, but there's still like, a little bit of the brick wall left attached to Scarpinos. And so you can see where the Coop was there. Then they moved over to Rock Street. And that little house is right across the street from Fayetteville Police Department.
Randy Wilburn [:Right, I know where that is.
Mike Anzalone [:They were there and then sort of their biggest and most visible when the Coop really started to catch the attention of people other than 70s hippies and back to landers was when they moved to Dixon Street. It's now, I believe, it's Puritan Coffee Shop.
Randy Wilburn [:Yeah, it's right across from the French antique place. So it's right there on Dixon Street just a little bit down from Colliers Drugs - opposite side of the street.
Mike Anzalone [:That was the Coop for quite a while, and people loved it there. There was no parking, so it was very difficult for them to keep things going. But I guess they made a lot of carrot juice there and it was just a tiny store, but people just absolutely loved the Coop when it was there. But they outgrew the space pretty quickly. For each of those locations the problem was that they were just getting more business than the location can handle and so they decided to move. And the move to Evelyn Hills was a very big move. I mean, if you've been in that location, that sales floor is 20,000 Sq. Ft.
Randy Wilburn [:What I think a lot of people don't realize is that there was like another 20,000 Sq. Ft downstairs.
Mike Anzalone [:Yeah. So the whole upstairs was about 25, 26,000 Sq. Ft and then there's the basement that matches that footprint.
Randy Wilburn [:Which I didn't realize until I was invited to the basement and I saw it. I was like, oh my God, this thing is huge.
Mike Anzalone [:It was huge. And it was kind of scary, like only half the lights worked and there were all these old offices that were still there and a lot of walls had gotten kind of musty. And finally we ended up gutting it all because it was just kind of a hazard to have down there. But we never ran a business out of there other than our feed store that we started. That building was just way too big for us. It was a pretty big jump from Dixon Street to Evelyn Hills and it almost sunk the Coop. We were about two weeks away from declaring bankruptcy and closing the doors.
Randy Wilburn [:What year was that?
Mike Anzalone [:That was ‘02, maybe. It was right before I got there. They just went through some hard times. They couldn't quite get enough business in the door to justify that kind of space and so they really struggled.
Randy Wilburn [:What turned things around?
Mike Anzalone [:Well, the general manager at the time, I've never met her, and so again this was before my time there. From what I understand, she just became a little overwhelmed with the pressure and decided to leave. And I think she moved back to Arizona or something. And the prior general manager, Alison Land, from what I understand, she just appointed herself the new general manager and just said, this Coop is not going down, we're going to save it. So she got some help from some local people and she just scrimped and saved and found ways to make deals just to get food in the back door and just really paid close attention on what was coming in and what was going out. We had no credit. It was all just cash on delivery at that point. But she was just very tenacious and put together a small team of people who just would not let this thing go under. And by the time I came in ‘06, it had started to make some strides, like we were paying our bills. We weren't near bankruptcy any longer. Sales were growing.
Randy Wilburn [:Was the membership growing at that point?
Mike Anzalone [:A little bit, yeah, it was growing a little bit. It was still very small, though. When I came at the very end of ‘06, we were almost up to 7 million in revenue. And so that was kind of the level where it could be self-sustaining. They did what a lot of businesses do when they moved to a bigger building. They hired a bunch of people and so all that payroll was really taxing. And I believe they had to lay off quite a few people and just get it down to sort of a skeleton crew. And when I got there, it was kind of fun because no one was just doing their job. And I put up the finger quotes, ‘their job’. You would have a title, but you would also be doing six other things, like the human resources manager was also producing the newsletter and also managed the front end.
Randy Wilburn [:It was all hands on deck.
Mike Anzalone [:It was. Everybody was just doing everything that had to be done and just coming to work knowing that all we're doing is we're keeping the place open and we're going to make sure this thing succeeds and we're not confined by our titles. We're not confined by whatever normal people think at their job is their job. Everybody was doing everything.
Randy Wilburn [:Okay, so you got there in ’06. When did you have a real appreciation for the Coop model, right? In the sense of when did you start to really kind of get your arms around the Coop model and how it existed within the confines of Ozark Natural Foods?
Mike Anzalone [:It took one year. When I moved back to Arkansas, I was writing for this fledgling magazine, and the woman who owned it and was the editor, she said, look, I can't pay you to write these articles, but I will be able to pay you in a year. In a year, if you find a job and you can just get by for a year, I'll put you on salary and we'll do this thing together. And so I found the job at the Coop and I thought, this is good because I know that I can help this store, and when I leave, I won't feel bad about leaving after a year because I know that it's going to be a better place when I leave. They'll have better systems in place, and I can bring all that Trader Joe's experience here to help them run better. And then I'll slip off and I'll do this magazine thing and I'll move forward with my career as a writer. And I was really lucky. I ended up sitting next to a guy named William Beaver, and at the time he was the ownership coordinator, or I can't remember what his title was, but his job was to be an advocate for the membership. And so he was very active with the Board, but he was very passionate about the Cooperative business model. And he would often interrupt me when I would just say, like, look, it's a store. We're selling food. And he would say, it's not just a store, it's a Cooperative and we happen to sell groceries. And I heard that over and over, and it used to be very frustrating because the Cooperative business model moves a little slower than traditional corporations, because we always have to take the time to think about our membership. And for years and years, we called it the ownership, but now we call it the membership. And the thing that we have to remember is that just because we work there doesn't mean we own it. The people who shop there own it. The people who are the members, they're the people who own it. And so that's the aspect of it that I became really interested in, and that made me after a year, say, like, you know what, I'm not going to do that magazine thing, I'm going to do this. I'm going to work for the community, and I'm going to help build this business. And it was just because I don't think that if I had sat next to someone other than William, who always took the time to very patiently correct me and teach me about why this business model is important, I think I would have left.
Randy Wilburn [:Interesting. And it just gave you a whole new perspective, right? You came out of a Trader Joe's model and you come into a Cooperative model. At what point did the food Coop become the largest food Coop in the state of Arkansas? Do you know that?
Mike Anzalone [:Immediately, because we're the only food Coop in the state of Arkansas. Even when we were in the back street and in the backside of the Cyclory, we were already the biggest food Coop in the state of Arkansas.
Randy Wilburn [:Okay, so one of one.
Mike Anzalone [:Yes.
Randy Wilburn [:I love that. Well, it's grown over the years, right? Because when you got there, I don't know how many members there were at that time, but we're up to currently as of the date of recording this in December of 2022, we are up to almost 13,000 members.
Mike Anzalone [:13 and a half.
Randy Wilburn [:13 and a half. I don't want to short change it.
Mike Anzalone [:Yeah. That is for sure the largest membership we've ever had.
Randy Wilburn [:Yeah. I wonder if the people that started the Coop back in ‘71 envisioned it being that large. I mean, there's some pictures on the website that anybody can see at onf.coop. If you want to see some of the pictures of some of the early folks that started the Coop. I wonder if they had envisioned it getting to the size that it is now.
Mike Anzalone [:Yes is the answer but it was so scrappy in the beginning. When I spoke to one of the very early general managers of the store and he told me that one of the benefits of him being the general manager was that he was allowed to live on the roof. And so I think this is when they were sharing the building with the warehouse or maybe when they were attached to the Scarpinos building. I'm not exactly sure what that building looked like, but he had a tent up there and that's where he lived. He lived up there, and then he would come down and work during the day. And I saw him about three or four months ago, and I just asked him what he thought. Some of the people who've been around since the 70s love the new building. Some of them don't like it at all.
Randy Wilburn [:Yeah, we're going to talk about the new building in a minute. I was just curious to get that insight there.
Mike Anzalone [:He was super excited, though, and he said, you know, there was a time that we used to sit around as Board members and as employees and we would talk about how one day we would love to have a store just like Safeway and that's the old IGA, and that's the building that we currently inhabit. And he's like, you got to be really careful what you wish for because here it is all these years later, and we finally have that exact building, and it's way better. It's way better than it was. But that was the goal. The goal was to really grow it into a legitimately sized business and that they would really all be really proud of. And lo and behold, we ended up right there where they had hoped to be.
Randy Wilburn [:And when you think about it, though, it was almost a fate of compli in terms of the evolution of the Coop. Because at the time, you had these smaller companies that were slowly hitting the national stage. And when I say companies, I'm speaking specifically of Whole Foods and other grocery stores that looked like a Coop but weren't quite a Coop. They were not structured that way. And I think it's like at some point in time, you had to decide whether you were going to either cut bait or you were going to dig in and try to make something happen. And clearly the Coop doubled down and said, hey, we're going to have to figure out a way to run with some of these bigger organizations like Whole Foods, which is now part of Amazon. They have an endless supply of capital and resources. You have Natural Grocers. You have a number of others, and you have your old company, Trader Joe's. And all of these businesses are making their inroads in communities across the country. And there are a lot of Coops like the Coop that are struggling to maintain relevance and to fight for market share in those areas.
Mike Anzalone [:Whole Foods in particular, when they started, they really had the same feel as the Coops and Mom and Pop grocery stores. And that's because John Mackey came from the Coop world. He tried doing grocery through the Cooperative business model and then at one point, he just decided that he just wanted to go out and do it on his own. And obviously he was very successful. But I think that's one of the reasons that it's been so difficult for Coops to stay in the game in the shadow of Whole Foods is because he so intimately understood the Coop business model and took the best elements of it and then just corporatized the rest of it. He understood why people loved those early food Coops and he was able to use that to his advantage.
Randy Wilburn [:It's funny you say that, because, I think about it every now and then. I do go in there and I'm a prime member with Amazon, so you do get some benefits with that. But I'm loyal to the Coop, and I try to spend as many of my dollars as I can at the Coop and I recognize that there are a lot of people who are like that. They are very conscious of where their money is going and whose pockets it's going into. And so I think it's important for people listening to this to recognize that one of the greatest benefits of a Coop, and specifically of our Coop, is the simple fact that it is supporting the local marketplace, the local vendors, the local farmers, and obviously, everybody that's employed. The dollar gets recirculated in our community multiple times, whereas at Whole Foods and at a lot of other grocery stores, say for maybe Harps, I guess that dollar doesn't get circulated in our community as much.
Mike Anzalone [:Yeah, that's right. I believe that's the reason I've ended up making my career here and not just sort of passing through is this idea that this business, it's not mine. If the Coop does great, I don't get rich. If the Coop does poor, I don't go broke. I'm just there. I do my job. But it's because it's owned by the community that I love it so much and that is really in line with my social views. I love this idea that I'm not working for a large, publicly traded corporation. Nothing against them. They have a place just like everyone else. But when people come in and decide to become a member of the Coop, they get one share in that Coop just like everyone else has one share in it and so we're all in it together. And the values of the Coop are driven by the values of the community, by the values of the people who were a part of that membership. It's changed over the years. It hasn't been stagnant. They didn't write the Articles of Incorporation in 1971, and then we still have the exact same values and run the store the same way. It's changed. And so, each generation gets to sort of pick up this legacy and become the new steward of it and carry it on for however long they want to and then pass it on to the next generation. And just in the short amount of time that I've been there, I've seen young people that have been hired, 18, 19, 20 years old, and then they finish school, and they get into their careers, and they have kids, and now their kids are working at the Coop. Once you start to see that sort of generational flip and you see, like, wow, this is happening in real time, just generation after generation taking responsibility for this store that's owned by us, neighbors. It's really amazing.
Randy Wilburn [:I think it is. And I think one of the things that maybe a lot of people don't know is that obviously the Coop has standards of quality with regard to everything that they look at. Even on your website, it says, we evaluate every product that the Coop sells with your health in mind. We stand behind the principle of not carrying genetically modified foods in the store. And then even the website goes on to list all of the products sold at Ozark Natural Foods which are free of all kinds of things such as artificial preservatives, artificial colors, artificial flavors, artificial sweeteners, chemical additives added MSG, non-irradiated, organically grown, and locally sourced whenever possible. In this day and age of food production, how difficult is it to maintain this?
Mike Anzalone [:That's really hard because they change the language all the time. They can call one chemical something this week, and next week they call it something different. And so we have to be really diligent. Of course, the best way to get the healthiest food is to get to know your local farmers who grow either organic or certified naturally grown or natural, and just ask them how they raise their cattle. How they raise their pigs. How they raise their chicken. What goes into their egg producers diets. And it cuts out all the shenanigans because you just meet the guy or the gal, and you just say, like, I love the way you grow your chicken. And then you just know.
Randy Wilburn [:Cage free, farm fresh.
Mike Anzalone [:Yeah, always the local farmer is the best way to go. It means that your food hasn't traveled from China or from Central or South America or even halfway across the country. It's really the best way in general. I mean, organics is good for humans, but it's also good for the planet. We're not poisoning the soil. We're not poisoning the water table. And then when you step that up to local organic or local certified naturally grown, then it hasn't been placed on a steamer ship that takes it. Do they still have steamer ships?
Randy Wilburn [:Yeah, that's fine. We get the idea. We understand what you're saying.
Mike Anzalone [:I don't even know if I'm old enough to say steamer ship?
Randy Wilburn [:I know it doesn't have to travel as far to get to your table.
Mike Anzalone [:Right. It comes 10 miles in the back of someone's pickup truck and then it goes to your house. And that reduction in energy and that reduction in oil consumption and the freshness of that product because it's picked one day and it's on your table the next day. That's really the best way. And we don't see the local farmers market as competition. We love the local farmers market, but these are the two ways you can do that, is either go to the Farmers’ Market or go to your local food Coop.
Randy Wilburn [:And again, I think it's exciting to see that Coops in general are still finding their place in the market and are still remaining relevant. Of course, there are always going to be challenges to that, but Ozark Natural Foods, just a couple of years ago, you guys decided to move from Evelyn Hills. You found a new location and decided to, as I like to say, double down on a new opportunity to continue to take the arc of the Coop and grow it in a different way. You got closer to downtown Fayetteville. You were totally ensconced firmly at the corner of Lafayette and North College, right in the heart of the downtown Fayetteville neighborhood. There the historic district. What went into the decision to do that and how tough was it to make that move from Evelyn Hills to the corner of Lafayette North College?
Mike Anzalone [:So as Whole Foods and Natural Grocers and Sprouts and all the rest of them were sort of taking over for about 15 years, the industry that really was created by Coops and small mom and pop health food stores across the country, a lot of Coops went under. And for a little while we saw from Coops just this idea of like, how do we just survive? How do we just survive? And then it started to change and a handful of us started saying, forget that. We still want to thrive. It's fine. Those stores can open, but we have something different to offer and we're not going to go gently into the night. We are going to fight and we are going to stay relevant. And the way we're going to stay relevant is by continuing to offer the best food that we can and make people understand why the Cooperative business model is so important to a community, but also do just a better job as grocers. Like have something that is not just appealing to the 60s and 70s generation, but really be appealing to multi-generations. And so, several years before Whole Foods and Natural Grocers showed up at our backyard, we ran scenarios and we talked about strategies on how do we survive in the shadow of Whole Foods. And we used to pretend, what happens if they buy out the property across the street from us and they open one of those huge Whole Foods right across the street from us. How do we make sure that there is still a thriving food Coop in our community? And I would say seven or eight years in a row we did that. And so, we ran strategies, and we came up with a plan based on those strategies, and we implemented that strategy. And I mean, when Whole Foods and Natural Grocers open, we took a thumping. We lost 40% of our business, and I don't really know many businesses that could suddenly lose 40% of their business and keep their doors open, but we did, and it was a very serious struggle. It was a tight plan for many years to be prepared for it. And once they got here, it was also a serious struggle. I'm very proud to say that our Coop never laid off anyone. Our Coop never cut any benefits to any employees, and we still managed to keep our doors open. And as we got through that period where it was just a matter of keeping the doors open to the period where we were starting to improve and get better and then start thinking, okay, now what's our next step? It was tough. It was like every day was a new day to come in and say, like, okay, we're going to stay open. And we did. And a lot of that is just that being a Coop we just had a lot of loyal owners who had seen this thing go for years and years and thought about it and made the decision. Am I going to give my money to a big national corporation that's now part of an international corporation, or am I going to continue to support these people who are farmers. They are young people who have their jobs there, other people who have their careers there and all the other people who are members of this Coop, which one am I going to support. And they supported us. They stuck with us through that really difficult time and then we got to a point where like, okay, now it's time for us to make a move and we did.
Randy Wilburn [:And it was the perfect movement in a lot of ways when you think of the simple fact that I think a lot of things were transforming at Evelyn Hills, maybe not for the better with regard to the Coop itself. And so finding a place that would offer you the space that you needed and also be super convenient for people. I always said when you guys were at Evelyn Hills, one of the challenges was that unless you knew the Coop was there, you would just keep driving by.
Mike Anzalone [:Yeah, that's true.
Randy Wilburn [:And nowadays, if you're driving north on North College towards, like downtown, towards the square of Fayetteville and you pass by that corner of Lafayette, you can't help but see the Coop. And if you go in the other direction, you can't help but see the beautiful chairs and patio and TV and heaters and everything that kind of welcomes you to a space where everyone has a place to sit down and relax and take it all in.
Mike Anzalone [:It's a very striking building.
Randy Wilburn [:It is.
Mike Anzalone [:We did not take an old grocery store and just put a new name on the front of it. We really changed the nature of that building. And Modus, they were our architects, they were pretty bold in the design. We spent a lot of time working on the floor plan. I actually went to Seattle and spent a few weeks with a floor planning guy up there, and we looked at dozens of grocery stores. And I've been to so many food Coops that I tried to implement a lot of the little things that I saw that I really liked about a lot of different food Coops. And Modus just took that floor plan and turned it into such that striking building. I mean, we came in second place in, there's a magazine called Architecture Magazine.
Randy Wilburn [:Yeah, it's a national competition.
Mike Anzalone [:It was a national competition and our grocery store won second place. It was unbelievable.
Randy Wilburn [:Well, I mean, that speaks volumes to Modus. I mean, they are no slouches when it comes to architectural design. They are a locally owned company right here in Fayetteville. Chris Baribeau and Leanne Baribeau and the rest of their team are absolutely outstanding. And hopefully we'll have them on the podcast as well to talk about just the whole process of the design. It's not a normal building. It's not a building where you walk in a central area. You actually enter from the side of the building, which I think is kind of cool. So you almost have to reorient yourself to the way that the building is set up. But once you get in, you realize you're like, oh, man, this is totally different. This is unlike anything that you normally experience.
Mike Anzalone [:It is very different. We were really lucky because the Baribeau’s, Chris and Leanne, as you know, is one of our board members now. They're very loyal Coop shoppers. They have been for many years. And so I think there might have been a little barrier trying to explain to someone, just an architect, who we chose about what it means to be a Coop, about what our store is about. They already knew they were all in before I ever even met them. And so when we started talking about elements that I'd like to bring and understanding the idea that this is owned by the members, it's owned by the people who shop here. And it really gave us a leg up because we had a common dialogue already because they had just been a part of it for a long time and they loved it. I mean, other than board meetings, I see Leanne all the time. She's always shopping in the Coop.
Randy Wilburn [:And I think that's another good point about it is that just the simple fact of the choice of the location and the real estate that you chose, of course we're not renting the place, the Coop owns that. All the members own that space. I don't think a lot of times people realize that, but it bears repeating that we're there for the long haul and there will be long term opportunities that the Coop will benefit from because of some of the decision making that you and the board undertook several years ago that will exist beyond your time here at the Coop.
Mike Anzalone [:That's right. We have a very valuable asset right there on a major intersection in downtown Fayette. And I don't own it, we own it.
Randy Wilburn [:Well, there's just so much what I did want to ask you, a couple of things that I know that you are involved with is the simple fact that you're not kind of sitting in a vacuum making decisions about how things go within the Coop because you seek counsel in a number of ways. Obviously, the board is your primary counsel, and then there's a lot of experts in the Coop space, but then you also interact with a lot of GMs around the country that are also part of Coops. I'd love for you to quickly talk about that and how that informs some of your decision making, the way you look at things that you're dealing with on a regular basis. And even right now, as we're recording this, we happen to be dealing with some inflationary challenges, and this recording will last for years but at the time of recording this in December of 2022, groceries couldn't be more expensive, and it's a challenge. I know that you are interacting with a lot of your peers around the country that are also dealing with a lot of the same issues. And I'd be curious to just have you speak quickly to how that has helped you in your decision making and also in some of the ways that you have modified some of the processes here within the Coop.
Mike Anzalone [:So just for a little explanation, our Coop is a member of another Coop called National Coop Grocers and that's about 250 stores across the country. Now, some of those Coops have two, three locations, and there's even one called PCC that has 17 locations, I believe. They're what we all strive to be. So we all get together in many ways. We get together through zoom meetings, and we have two annual meetings where all the GMs in the country get together, and we end up being peers with all these different Coops. We're all in the same situation. We're not a traditional corporation where some corporate offices tell us how we're going to react in the market and tell us what we're going to do, and sends us new procedures and have legal teams to write all that stuff that they have. It's usually just a bunch of us who there's one GM, one store and we're doing the best we can, but we have this opportunity to learn from each other. And we exchange all of our data. There's a database that has all of our financials in them, and we pass those around essentially to tell each other this is how we're doing and this is how much we've grown, and this is what our margins like, and this is what our labor is like, and all these things.
Randy Wilburn [:It makes benchmarking easier.
Mike Anzalone [:It does. And so then we get to speak to each other like, oh, I saw that you grew sales by like seven and a half percentage. How did you do that? And so we really help each other. And when you're young Coop, and you just have questions like, how do you get your staff to clock in on time, or you have these really highly technical questions about the finer art of making margin and still being able to support sales and things like that. You have all these people, all these resources to go to and just kick ideas around. And so, the organization is not just peer group, they also have a lot of training programs. And so as our organization is growing and as our Coops are growing, NCG is also growing, they're becoming better and better at providing help to GMs, providing help to directors of boards on the technical aspects of running a small grocery store.
Randy Wilburn [:It has to be helpful because I know that there's always safety in numbers when it comes to council and when it comes to seeing how things are out in the marketplace. So that's really beneficial.
Mike Anzalone [:It's a great organization. I forgot, the whole biggest part of that organization is that collectively we purchase all of our food through UNFI. They hold our contract, and so, we're not a single store buying from a large distributor. We're 250 locations buying from a single distributor and in that volume we end up getting much better deals on our food.
Randy Wilburn [:Well, it makes it more affordable, and it also allows you to compete with much larger entities that have distribution centers all over the place. We think of that because we're sitting in the shadow of Walmart so when you think of how retail operations are, we have our own version of that with NCG and UNFI. It does help the process. What are you most passionate or excited about for the future coming out? We're in a new space, the pandemic was a challenge for all of us, and, if anything, I think one of the good things that did come out of the pandemic is that we ended up re-engaging with a whole new set of members and people that didn't really know about the Coop and that one group that I'm talking about specifically are students. Students became acutely aware of the Coop because for the longest time when everything was shut down, the Coop was open and a lot of students couldn't go places on campus. They would come up to the Coop to study and grab coffee and grab a lunch, you name it. And inadvertently, because of the pandemic, it reintroduced the Coop to a whole segment of the population, specifically in Fayetteville, because, I mean, 30,000 plus students go to the University of Arkansas. So that's a huge audience. How did that impact the Coop?
Mike Anzalone [:Well, for years we struggled with that. So we've always known that there's this large resource, the university, but we had a very difficult time connecting with them. We did very well with the baby boomer generation. They started us. They stuck with us and through all those changes and all the difficult times that we had, the boomer generation really stayed with the Coop. But we noticed that it was becoming as generations moved along, it was becoming more and more difficult to connect with Gen X than Gen Z, than millennials or millennials than Gen Z. And we weren't quite sure how we were going to do it, but we knew that it was going to be necessary if there was going to be real longevity to the Coop. And so, when we moved to the new location, it was very obvious that we needed a place where people could feel comfortable to just come and hang out. And we were thinking, specifically, students come, bring their laptop, drink some coffee and just hang out. Just make the Coop the place where people come and sit and meet with their neighbors. And that was very difficult in Evelyn Hills. We had a very, very small seating area. We had an outdoor seating area, but it was adjacent to a parking lot, and the sun would just roast you if you were there in the middle of the day. It was brutal. And so one of the main things that I had talked about with Chris and Leanne was that we wanted to have more than enough space where a lot of people could come and just hang out at the food Coop. And so the location, obviously, it's just two blocks away from the university, but then the patio and the interior, the coffee shop and the inside seating area gave people plenty of room. I remember talking to Ryan, our IT Manager when he was sort of talking about what we wanted to do with our Wi-Fi and how we could cut corners a little bit. I was like, we're not cutting any corners. Imagine there's 100 people and they're all on Netflix. We want everybody to be able to have great internet access so that they can just come and do whatever they want to do. And so, we put all those elements together. But then Lisa, our Marketing Manager, she worked with Black Box Labs on rebranding, we really felt that we wanted to change our brand and make it more accessible. We really loved the idea of branding as the Coop so that we could create a new curiosity about the Cooperative business model and something that would be simpler than Ozark Natural Foods or a lot of people called us ONF but then nobody knows what ONF means unless you're on the inside. We wanted to really open up our brand so that it would reach multiple generations and it would also spark some curiosity. And so we went with the Coop and new logos. It just changed everything - our whole new brand guide. And the work between those two companies, between Black Box and Modus, the symbiosis between the brand and the new building just worked out incredibly. And so it is so eye catching, and it's there on the street corner and that sort of chopped off corner with entry that has the sign that says, Everyone welcome and it's facing that intersection, which is the second busiest intersection in Fayetteville. It's just so inviting. It just pulls you in. And we went through that genesis, and we are still Ozark Natural Foods. We are still that same little buying club that started in the 70s, but we are also Coop this great place to come and buy healthy food and hang out with your neighbors and enjoy the sunshine in a swing. I'm very proud of it and I'm very proud of what we've built.
Randy Wilburn [:I want to ask you this one question because you said, everyone welcome and I know one of the challenges that our Coop, as well as a lot of Coops face because of the rising cost of food, is how do we get everyone through the doors of the Coop to make sure that they have access to all the great food, all of the great resources, all the great products that we have available within the four walls of the Coop building?
Mike Anzalone [:So the idea was to just offer a bunch of different stuff, right? So even the way the building is designed, you just have all these choices. And so you can come there for multiple reasons. You don't have to come there to fill your grocery cart, even as you enter. You don't even have to enter. You can just go to the right and go to the patio and get a beer or a coffee and a scone or whatever and just stay outside and just be outside if you want to, or you can come inside. You can sort of go down prepared foods area and head off into the coffee shop. You can have a scone or a lunch or anything you want to have. Or on the other side of the building, we also have The Homestead, which has all those pet supplies, gardening supplies, pots, plants, crystals, and all those things. I do know people who have come in and they just shop at The Homestead and they don't even realize that the grocery store is a part of The Homestead. And then, of course, we have just a full traditional grocery store where you can get everything you need, from supplements to bulk foods, fresh produce, any grocery items you want, housewares, and all those sorts of things. We're getting very much into gifty items. The place is exploding, thanks to the buying team with all these great stocking stuffers right now. And there's a little bit of a lot of things there to attract a lot of different people. And then when they get in to get those things, they say like, oh, wow, okay, I could use lunch here if I wanted to. I can come here for happy hour and just have a few beers or a glass of wine. And so, there's a lot of offerings there.
Randy Wilburn [:And so I get what you're saying. You're saying, essentially, that there is something for everyone at the Coop, both big and small. Like, for some people coming to the Coop means spending an hour or two shop doing all of their main grocery shopping. For some, it means just coming and grabbing a coffee and a vegan scone on a regular basis or something along those lines but there is something for everybody that comes to the Coop.
Mike Anzalone [:That's what the sign means.
Randy Wilburn [:And you even have everyone's welcome.
Mike Anzalone [:We do. We have incredible sushi.
Randy Wilburn [:Incredible sushi. There is a little bit for everyone. I don't know that any retail outlet is perfect in the sense that it covers every single thing, right. It's like that joke on the episode of Seinfeld. And I'm taking myself back now, but when George was working for the Yankees and he was responsible for figuring out the size of everybody's head on Hat Day for fitted hats, he was like, how do I account for every size head? And it's hard to do but you do the best that you can.
Mike Anzalone [:That's right.
Randy Wilburn [:In terms of trying to satisfy as many needs as possible.
Mike Anzalone [:We did our best, George Costanza. Like, right now, what I'm really excited about is apples. We have so many heritage apples right now, it's unbelievable. We have the ones that we can get all year round. The pink lady and Macintosh and what's the green one? I never even get it anymore.
Randy Wilburn [:Granny Smith.
Mike Anzalone [:Yeah, the Granny Smith We have all these heritage apples now. So just like last week, I just bought my mom a dozen apples just because there's so many of them. They're so good, and they all taste different and delicious, and some of them are really sweet, and some are really tart. I've probably had 60 apples in the last three weeks, but that's the kind of food that we're looking for. We're not really just looking to just click the box of the order guide. We're really trying to find a wide variety of healthy food that people can come in and be excited about.
Randy Wilburn [:Plus, I don't think a lot of people realize that live here, and I didn't realize this until I started interviewing people over the past couple of years, but apples were a huge staple here, like, historically.
Mike Anzalone [:Yeah, that's right.
Randy Wilburn [:We don't have as many apple places now, but I came from New England before I moved here, and apple picking was a big thing. But my understanding was that Arkansas had huge apple farms and just all over the place.
Mike Anzalone [:I don't know if that's the whole state, but I know…
Randy Wilburn [:It was not the whole state, but they had enough where people took notice of it. There's a company called Black Apple Cider, which they took their name after that. And the simple fact that there were so many, Black Apple has, funny enough, has made an investment into building more apple farms so that they can resurrect some of what was here at the turn of the last century.
Mike Anzalone [:That's cool. We currently have some Arkansas blacks right now. That's an amazing apple.
Randy Wilburn [:It is an amazing apple.
Mike Anzalone [:Even Brightwater was an apple that culinary school is named after a local apple called Brightwater Apple.
Randy Wilburn [:You see you learn something new every day. I did not know that. Now I have to write that down, but that's good to know.
Mike Anzalone [:Hope that's true now that I just got it.
Randy Wilburn [:Well, I'm sure somebody listening. It sounds good, so we'll let it go with that. No, I'm sure somebody listening will be thankful for that information. So as we wind this up, because you have been really gracious with your time and regaling us with some really cool stories about the Coop. What are your hopes for the Coop for the next five to ten years?
Mike Anzalone [:I just want to see us grow. I don't want us to grow to the point that we lose our identity, but I would love to see the Coop grow enough that there's enough of us for anyone in Northwest Arkansas who wants to be a part of this Coop. And so, it's no secret we had a public board meeting about the ten year plan that I offered the board, and the board's pretty enthusiastic about it, and even though it's had to slow because of the recession, and we have to sort of regain our footing with what's going on in the industry at the moment, the plan is still the same. I would love to see three, possibly four satellite stores throughout Northwest Arkansas, and I love the idea of the satellite stores. But I'm even more passionate about the idea of building a fleet of mobile grocery stores that can get out into the rural areas where there is truly a food desert. I don't think people realize because of the abundance in Northwest Arkansas that there are food deserts very close to us. If you don't live right down the corridor and you just get a few miles east or west of us, it's very hard to get healthy food. And the farther you go out into the rural areas, into the counties, it's almost impossible to get healthy food unless you grow it yourself or unless you make a monthly trip into Northwest Arkansas into the corridor where you can go to one of the few stores. And I think it would be a fantastic symbiotic relationship with those rural communities because we could bring them the things that they need and then the things that they have a surplus of. Local gardens, local farms that don't have the means to get into Fayetteville or get into Bentonville on a weekly basis. We can aggregate that food and bring it back to our community. And so we can bring them the things that they need. We can buy and redistribute the things that they have a surplus of, and it could help grow the food economy, but also their financial economy. And making those relationships and making those ties through food that is the core of the mission of our Cooperative.
Randy Wilburn [:And that would be huge because, I mean, when you think back and we'll tie it back to the front part of the story where you shared about your mom coming up here from Russellville to get brown rice and yogurt and now it wasn't really a challenge for her but there are a lot of people that are right here in our backyard in Northwest Arkansas that can't get to Lafayette and North College and satisfying that need. So people taking time to support, give to the Coop through their buying dollars will actually go a long way in helping to bring to fruition some of these goals and plans to expand the footprint of the food that we offer and to certainly combat food insecurity and food deserts that, unfortunately, the pandemic just really revealed. It just pulled back the curtain and it was like, this is a real problem even right here in our own backyard, and how do we deal with it?
Mike Anzalone [:I mean, I don't want to get too side-lined into the pandemic, but I think we all saw that our supply chain is very fragile. And it's very fragile because it's so large and because everything that we get has to travel so far to get to people whereas building a strong local economy, a strong local food economy makes us very insulated to that. And the more that we can do, the more people that we can bring into our Cooperative, the more food that we can move from farm to store to household. The more secure our region is, the more secure our diets are, and the more we collectively own something that's more and more valuable.
Randy Wilburn [:Well, Mike, if anybody, after listening to this wants to just connect with you and maybe chat with you based on some of the things that you shared on this particular podcast, what's the best way for them to do that?
Mike Anzalone [:Hey, they can do whatever they want. They can email me. I'm mike@onf.coop. You can call the store if you just happen to be shopping and you just want to say hi, just ask for me and I'll come out to the sales floor. If you want to make an appointment and we really want to spend some time together, call, let's make an appointment and we'll just hang out in my office. Any way they'd like to get in touch with me, I'm available.
Randy Wilburn [:Okay, perfect. Well, Mike Anzalone, General Manager of the Coop, we really appreciate you taking time to join us on this inaugural podcast. I'm sure we'll have you back on another episode and we'll talk some more about the Coop business model, but thank you so much for joining us.
Mike Anzalone [:Thank you, Randy. I always love our conversations.
Randy Wilburn [:We appreciate you taking time to learn more about Ozark Natural Foods, The Coop. This podcast was developed to highlight a community created more than 50 years ago with a focus on the love of food that is good for us and our planet. We have plenty of stories to tell, so stay tuned for more. I'm your host, Randy Wilburn, and we'll see you back here soon. Take care.
Close ONF [: we say keeping it local since:
