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Comment by wcerfgba | Hacker News Reader

Wonderful story, thanks for sharing.

Do you know any worker-owned food businesses? Share in the comments!

In Preston, UK, we have The Larder. Not sure about the ownership model but it is a social enterprise working on food justice: https://larder.org.uk/

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In San Francisco, the Rainbow Grocery Cooperative has been around since the 70s. While working in the food industry in San Francisco, I had heard that employees there made in the ballpark of 100k~ a year, but that's purely hearsay and I have no idea how accurate it is. Before Bay Area tech workers chime in with how even 100k~ is effectively unlivable out there, I'll mention that I lived on about 25k a year in the Bay Area between 2010 and 2017, and lots of people -- food and service workers, teachers, warehouse workers, delivery drivers -- scrape by on similar or less, with no benefits or equity. You might be surprised how many restaurants and bars and grocery stores in the Bay hire their cashiers, busboys, dishwashers, and cooks as contractors, or pay them cash under the table.

Back on topic: there's also the Cheese Board in Berkeley, CA, and Arizmendi Bakery but not sure if the salaries are as great. There used to be a great bakery in South Berkeley that was worker owned and fairly well known, but the name is escaping me (edit: it was Nabolom Bakery). In any case, that one struggled more with the business side and employee salaries were close to minimum wage.

Another aside: it's interesting to me how lots of tech workers in the Bay Area live in an entirely different Bay Area than me or most people I knew out there -- these two worlds seem to scarcely talk to each other in any meaningful ways.

In the western US, Winco is a pretty large grocery store owned by employees.

Publix is employee-owned in the South, but some own a lot more than others.

Publix is complicated. One family controls about 30% of the shares, and the company has done things (like donate lots of money to conservative PACs) that many employees are unhappy with.

I'm curious about the pay at Arizmendi but not that curious. The Oakland Arizmendi started taking tips towards the end of last year on a trial basis (and of course it stuck around), so I can't imagine the workers are getting paid too well. Then again they're pretty reasonably priced.

I'd say up until early/mid-2022 or so you could get by on a surprisingly small amount of money in San Francisco. Watching prices skyrocket over the past 18 months or so has been a wild ride.

  Another aside: it's interesting to me how lots of tech workers in the Bay
  Area live in an entirely different Bay Area than me or most people I knew
  out there -- these two worlds seem to scarcely talk to each other in any
  meaningful ways.

Well, yes. HN in particular.

We have tons of worker-owned cooperatives in Berkeley, including Cheese Board Collective that is successful, and one block from that The Local Butcher, also worker-owned. A few blocks down was the worker-owned bike shop but it went under for reasons related to having admitted a notorious bozo into the co-op. We also have Nabolom Bakery that failed after decades as a worker co-op but survives today as an owner-owned business.

Is Zachary's Pizza in the same category? (I seem to recall being told there was something unusual about their structure but I can't recall the details)

You might be thinking of Arizmendi, which is a spin-off of Cheeseboard. Zachary's is family-owned, not really an uncommon setup.

Zachary's has been employee-owned for 20 years:

> Zachary’s was founded in 1983 by Zach Zachowski and Barbara Gabel. Our employee ownership program began in 2003 via an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan). Through the vision of our founders, Zachary’s is now a 100% employee owned company.

https://zacharys.com/about-us/our-people/

Also, the specifics of the relationship between Cheeseboard and Arizmendi are interesting: https://www.sfweekly.com/dining/arizmendi-bakery-s-bread-bas...

So much for trusting indexed search engine result blurbs! Thanks for the clarification.

Yeah. Cooperative pizza is an entire thing. Arizmendi is also worker-owned, as is Nick's in Oakland.

I love Cheese Board, but look, several of their members left the coop and opened a regular corp Sliver as a direct competitor, which expanded to multiple locations. They can't remake the brand, but their pizza is just as good. "You either die a hero or..."

We have an embarrassment of good pizza around here. Speaking for myself I am little tired of the theme and I prefer a pizza that was in no way influenced by Alice Waters. We have plenty of that too, luckily.

I enjoyed the amount of pizza when I lived there, but it was getting annoying how many boba shops there were. Got to the point where a business I enjoyed shut down, and I could guess pretty accurately that a new boba shop would replace it. And somehow the average price for boba went up each time a new shop opened.

Since you mentioned social enterprises, I'll share this repo I made where I keep track of resources for learning about social enterprises. https://github.com/RayBB/awesome-social-enterprise

Btw the definition varies a good bit around the world but generally a social enterprise is more about the goal of the organization and a coop (or worker-owned) is about who has power the make decisions in the org.

In Athens, Ohio, there's Casa Nueva, a worker's cooperative Mexican cantina: https://casanueva.com/about-us/our-story/

In Ithaca, NY and its surrounds, Gimme! Coffee recently became a worker-owned enterprise: https://ithacavoice.org/2022/07/a-labor-of-love-gimme-coffee...

Hell's Kitchen in Minneapolis does something along these lines though the details aren't entirely obvious to me.

https://www.hellskitcheninc.com/

teamshares.com

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