People’s Co-Op Moves To Expand

By Jonathan Kleyer

The People’s Food Co-op, a 40 year old Kalamazoo business that prides itself on buying locally-grown, “natural” food, has announced that it will be constructing a new building to expand into.

Currently, the customer-owned co-op operates in a 784 square foot store on South Burdick Street. The co-op is finalizing an agreement with the city to buy a vacant lot at 507 Harrison Street.

According to Chris Dilly, the co-op’s general manager, the lot is a Brownfield site that had been contaminated by the paper industry and cleaned up by the city.

“The location sits on the northeast edge of downtown and puts us in community with other excellent food-related businesses like MacKenzie’s, Bell’s, Water Street Coffee Joint, and Food Dance. Highly visible from Gull Road as it turns into Ransom, this route along Harrison is well-travelled as a throughway connecting downtown with the Northside Neighborhood, the Eastside Neighborhood, Parchment, Richland, and beyond,” he described.

Though the building plans are not final, the co-op intends to construct its new building to be roughly 6,000 square feet in size, allowing the store to quadruple its retail area and providing enough space to host the Can-Do Kitchen—a Fair Food Matters project—as a renter.

Dilly said, “This partnership is very exciting for us as it will bring more visibility to the Can-Do Kitchen as it gives food entrepreneurs access to a licensed kitchen, and it will allow People’s, as a user of the program, to have a larger kitchen than we could afford on our own. It will also mean an on-site home for our cooking classes!”

The plan also allows for enough space, on the lot, for a parking lot with 32 parking spots and a grassy arbor area that Dilly hopes to use as a site for the 100-Mile Market, the co-op’s new farmer’s market, or outdoor seating for the co-op’s deli.

Additionally, the southern edge of the lot is currently Willard Street, but according to Dilly, it will be converted into part of the Kalamazoo River Valley Trail.
The co-op will periodically post project updates online at www.peoplesfoodco-op.org/expansion.php.