To start a food buying group with a cooperative warehouse you will first want to contact the warehouse to verify that there are no other active groups in your area AND you will also need to find out if your town is covered by one of the warehouses truck routes. Visit our Food for Thought section to see which Cooperative Warehouse services your state.

If the warehouse for your area does not currently have an active group near you and you are on one of their routes have them send you out a new buying group packet including a price catalog. They may charge you for these items. This packet will include the products available through the warehouse and requirements for starting a maintaining a food buying group through them.

Once you feel that you want to start a group in your area, start looking for people to join the food buying group. Any purchases made through the warehouse must meet a minimum and large orders receive discounts for volume. So the more people in the group the larger the buying power. Find interested people by posting signs at your Church, Work, Asking adults in your Scout Group, Tennis League, Play Group. LLL, etc. Basically anyone who uses vitamins, eats healthy, or diets might find products at a better price through the group.

To Start a Club with a warehouse someone will need to set up an account and take responsibility for that account. The responsible party will have to show credit worthiness and/or have a credit card on file with the warehouse. Members of the buying group will either have to pay for their orders upon placing them or pay for their orders when they pick them up. I suggest starting out with money up front. That will establish that the order is set in stone and they will be less chances of someone not picking up an order and leaving unwanted products. As you continue with the food warehouse some of them have accounts where you can get billed thus you could have people pay when they pick up the food. This is the easier method since sometimes when you place an order the warehouse has the items, but when the order arrives the items where not available so if people gave you money up front you would have to recalculate their totals and reimburse them money.

To offset the administrative cost of maintaining the buying group most coordinators charge members a surcharge (5-10%) based on their order. If you run the buying group cooperatively you may forgo the surcharge and require that all buying members donate a certain amount of time to the buying group to minimize duties to one individual in particular. Members can help - unload the truck, sort the orders, call in the order to the warehouse, etc.

I would suggest to anyone interested in starting a group to start out simple. In the beginning just allow people to buy cases or full items (25# of flour, etc.) as your group grows you may want to start allowing people to split cases but this will be more work for you or the group volunteers.

This is just some of the things to consider. Group buying clubs can of course become very large and cumbersome and then they turn into food cooperative store front. Often, however, as the group grows and so does it’s administrative duties and so groups must charge more to cover these extra costs and thus the whole point of starting a food buying group - to save money! - is diminished.