Two years after its opening in Toulouse, La Chouette Coop is perpetuating its model
“I’m looking for flax seeds, but there won’t be any until Saturday, so I’ll wait, because I avoid shopping elsewhere.”, explains Hafida. This elsewhere is not about this young woman accustomed to the Chouette Coop, it is the classic supermarkets.
For five years, Hafida has been almost exclusively teaching in this supermarket, which has only one thing in common with those owned by the giants of large retailers: the shelves filled with all the products generally sold in supermarkets.
A collaborative, participative and affordable supermarket
At La Chouette Coop, customers are not just consumers. To shop in this 275 square meter supermarket, you have to meet two conditions: buy shares and do your PIAF (Indispensable Participation In Operation) by volunteering in the store for three hours every three weeks.
The two criteria fulfilled make it possible to buy products, often organic and local (85% of fruits and vegetables are organic), and much cheaper than in traditional distribution channels.
“We are 10 to 20% cheaper than mass distribution. This is explained by the margin that we set for our products, it is 25% and remains fixed”explains Chrystel Gérard, the coordinator of the cooperative supermarket.
Do not seek profit at all costs. The reverse idea of the mass distribution system did not come from nowhere. car like the majority of cooperative supermarkets that have tried in France in recent years, the Chouette Coop model has been inspired by the Park Slope Food Coop (PSFC)). Created in the early 1970s in the New York district of Brooklyn, the first born supermarket of this type now has more than 17,000 members and has defended an alternative consumption model since its inception.
The idea is not to make ever greater profits, to cut into producers’ margins, or to increase the number of intermediaries. At the PSFC, we favor short circuits in order to offer quality products, often from organic farming and at prices that aim to remain affordable.
Social links with producers
If the eco-responsible values at the center of the approach undertaken by the Chouette Coop are, another aspect of the cooperative supermarket is just as important.
To run this store, the Chouette Coop has set up several decision-making groups led by volunteers. Among them, the Appro group for supply and Gaac (group articles analysis and choice). They are the ones who put in place the logistics necessary to monitor suppliers, to take care of them, but also to transmit the wishes of Chouettos. Because among the 100 suppliers of the store, some have been identified by members wishing to see the products of this or that producer appear in the store.
Of the 2240 references offered by the Chouette Coop, including 120 sold in bulk, some come from the production of easily identifiable suppliers for the Chouettos. Because by surveying the various departments of the cooperative supermarket, one does not only find products, but also informative signs which present the approach of such or such producer.
First name and history of the supplier, commitments with which it is associated, photo of its operation, these signs recall a chosen one: the importance that this cooperative supermarket model gives to social ties.
And with people
Because if the thousand Chouettos convinced by the concept of the Chouette Coop have been running this supermarket for years, it is not only to have the assurance of knowing what they put on their plates.
“We don’t all know, but we are all part of a common project. We are not just consumers, but also players and that changes a lot of things in the relationship to others. There is a political dimension without being contestant in the way of dealing with what we know of consumption models while paying for something new. It is this creation of links that interests me”, underlines Clarisse. At La Chouette for a year and a half, the young woman claims to have invested in it above all”for the social side”.
Alongside its mission as a supermarket, La Chouette Coop also puts on this social side dear to this member by planning various appointments. On the menu, workshops in French sign language (LSF), gardening or cooking and dedicated events.
On June 25, La Chouette Coop is joining forces with the independent cinema Utopia (Borderouge) to screen five short films with a theme that cannot be invented for a supermarket of this type: that of eating well.