- Tracci Dial here with another community spotlight.

This time, it was an idea that started with just a few people.

And today it is a thriving market.

- Our food co-op is completely community driven.

We started organizing about four years ago, and we are a group of farmers, artists, ranchers, foodies, and just a bunch of people who really love local and organic produce.

We came together in 2024, we were able to open our doors in October.

And, yeah, it's just been a real big labor of love from all of our community members.

- How many people did it take to come together to create this?

- Right now, our membership is over 850 people.

So that is just our current membership base.

And at the beginning, it was just a handful of really passionate individuals.

- When you talk about a co-op, for those of us who don't know exactly what that is, how does it work?

- Yeah.

So a co-op is a group of people coming together to pool their resources to make something in their community that hasn't existed before.

There's a huge, rich history of cooperatives.

We have a preschool co-op here in Richland, for example.

There are a lot, a lot of co-ops.

They started in the Industrial revolution as a way for artisans and crafters to gather together and to pull their resources so that they could make better wages for the artists, but also for the consumers that were buying their goods.

And so we're in a really rich legacy of that here at the Tri-Cities Food Co-op, and we're excited to really pool together our resources and have this collective grocery store.

Now tell me about some of the farmers.

You have some cool stories of folks here.

I know Erica, she's our farmer that... Our dairy farmer.

Erica lives in Milton-Freewater.

I know her by name.

Right?

Being able to talk to Shannon, our fifth generation fishery, who fishes in the Alaskan waters with her children, brings their babies, drops them off.

Right?

So all of these amazing local people, I get to know that we're supporting them by name and their families.

Compared to any other store, you don't have that ability to really connect with the people that are producing your food.

For NWPB in Richland, I'm Tracci Dial.