Our Story

1844: We trace our roots to Rochdale, England, an industrious, hardscrabble city about 40 miles northwest of Liverpool, nestled in the moors and hill country of the South Pennines. Tired of the “one guy owns everything and you get the crumbs” business model, a group of weavers and artisans gathered on Toad Lane to open a little store with a radical governance model: one member, one vote. The cooperative movement was born.

1936: Good ideas are like sourdough starter; they tend to bubble over. The cooperation idea spread, and during the Great Depression, 17 neighbors in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Norwich, Vermont, formed the Hanover Consumer’s Club—an early food co-op and one of the first in the U.S. This wasn’t a revolution of pitchforks and torches, but of pooled orders for maple syrup and cases of Florida citrus. It was a sticky, delicious uprising that proved you could fight the Man with a really good grapefruit.

1940s–1950s: After a brief stint in a basement—which made us very “underground” before it was trendy—we moved to a proper downtown Hanover storefront. We introduced the town’s first self-service grocery model, finally trusting people to pick out their own onions without professional supervision.

1963: The Co-op migrated to our current South Park Street location. Why? Two words: Breathing room. Also, parking. Mostly parking. We’ve been trying to master the art of the grocery store parking lot ever since.

1980s: We decided that if we could sell you kale, we could probably fix your car, too. We added the Mobil service station on Park Street, which remains one of the only cooperatively owned auto centers in the U.S. (We’re proud to be one of the few places where you can regularly get an oil change and a lecture on organic tomatoes from the same staff.)

1997–2000s: Growth spurt! We added the Lebanon and White River Junction markets and another service center in Norwich.

Today: We’re owned by 33,000+ members and our shelves are stocked by more than 400 local small family farms. We’re closing in on $100 million in annual sales—which is a terrifying amount of maple syrup if you really stop to think about it.

Being a community-owned cooperative, our business model is very different from the usual store. Our sole responsibility is to meet the needs of our members and customers, not to make a profit for one owner or a small group of investors.