The co-op's commitment to buying local really makes a difference with many, many businesses in Vermont, especially here in Addison County. It's keeping lots of small businesses going. Their commitment to buying local food will never be able to compete on price across the board. That's not possible. This is one store working against huge chains. Yes, we do have the National Cooperative Grocers Agreement for products that are agreed upon on contract pricing. It's great to have good prices on some of those things.

However, most of those products are not products that are local. They're products you can find anywhere. Just going to the annual meeting when they do the numbers of how many millions of dollars every year they're selling of local food, it's astounding. There's a massive impact financially, and I know that farmers feel supported. The farmers who are selling through the co-op feel, I think, so grateful to have that access to a wider audience because people come from all over Addison County and sometimes Rutland County—I live in Rutland County—to go to the co-op. You're not going to run into Shaw's or Hannaford and find local defined as we define it, which is within Vermont. You're not going to find small farms represented in those places because it's inefficient. It requires people that live and work in the store to make hard decisions about what you're bringing in every day, which doesn't happen in other stores.

I'd say we definitely would not have been able to do our business the way we have without the co-op. They've been an incredible partner to work with. You can feel how much they value buying locally or buying from people, like farms in the area. And every time that the season is ending and we're running out of X, Y, or Z, they're like, we have to go back to buying it from afar. But not like they're guilt tripping us. I just, I think that they really, like you can feel the value that it has to them.

They're marking local products up less. So that way they can keep prices competitive. And they really take into consideration what we feel like we need to get paid for certain things to make it possible to keep going. A lot of small farms around here exist in part or wholly because of the co-op.