Menomonie Market Forms New Sustainability Team

It’s been years in the making, and it finally happened. As of January, Menomonie Market Food Co-op has a new Sustainability Team, and I can tell you now, I and my fellow team members are very excited to get to work!

This team is currently composed of four members: me (Marketing Manager), Joe (Merchandising Manager), Becca (Outreach & Education Coordinator), and Carly (Deli Team Member). 

On February 23rd, our team held its first meeting—with our General Manager, Crystal Halvorson in attendance—so we could review our charter, recap our co-op’s sustainability initiatives up to this point, and discuss the projects that we want to tackle first. After over an hour of discussions, we each left that meeting with more clarity and a list of tasks to complete, and I’m happy to report that we made good progress on them before our productivity was impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak.

Our first projects have included bringing in organic frozen vegetables from Sno Pac Foods, instead of a national brand, to reduce our footprint and support local; partnering with UW-Stout students to research alternatives to the plastic packaging used in our store; exploring green chill certification; and building a new sustainability section of our website to keep you, our owners and shoppers, better informed on our  team’s initiatives going forward. Although much of this work has stalled due to all the changes we’ve been forced to make because of the outbreak, we do plan to slowly continue it and will share updates as projects are completed.

If you have a project you’d like our team to consider, contact us at mmfc.coop/contact, and we will discuss it at our next meeting… when life returns to normal, and we can have one, that is! 

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