5 reasons you need to check out Weaver Street Market today

Weaver Street Market is more than 'just' a grocery store. Founded with the goal to sustain healthy communities, Weaver Street Market works everyday to support local producers, people and nonprofits.

Posted 4:36 p.m. May 17 — Updated 4:36 p.m. May 17

This article was written for our sponsor, Weaver Street Market

A cooperative enterprise is defined by the International Cooperative Alliance as: "An autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise."

In short, co-ops are people-centric and generally have a mission to achieve a common goal. For Weaver Street Market, founded by current General Manager Ruffin Slater, and a group of like-minded people, that goal was to provide their community with high-quality, locally-sourced food. In addition, they wanted to ensure that their venture had a sustained, positive impact on the people within their communities.

Jon McDonald, bread bakery manager at Weaver Street Market’s FoodHouse summarized the founding like this: "A group of people were looking for a way to [offer] organic and natural foods, so they began the co-op to solve this problem."

It may seem simple, but for the four communities that Weaver Street Market now serves -Carrboro, Chapel Hill, Hillsborough and Raleigh- the venture has been a game changer.

"Co-ops offer communities a lot of benefits — like access to food, good jobs, gathering spaces — but the most unique thing about co-ops is that they inherently keep equity local," said McDonald. "When you buy at a co-op, the beneficiaries are the people who work and use the store, not an out-of-town owner or hedge fund or stock share."

McDonald began working at Weaver Street in 2008 as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"I came to Weaver Street because of my interest in bread baking, but over time I became enamored with the co-op model and its potential to bring together workers, producers, and consumers to build sustainable community around selling food," he said.

Here are 5 reasons why you should check out your local Weaver Street Market today.

Fresh baked goods and prepared foods

The Weaver Street bakery is known for fresh bread, baked daily with organic, locally-sourced flours. Its traditional hearth loaves are made without preservatives using preferments, fermented flour, yeast, and liquid, to provide for longer fermentation times. Products range from Irish soda bread to rolls and bagels and from fruit tarts to croissants.

Spotlight: Sponsored: 5 reasons you need to check out Weaver Street Market today

Ready to try a new place for a lunch out? The market also offers hot, ready-to-eat foods throughout the day, including brunch potatoes, baked ziti, cilantro rice, chana masala, and vegetarian samosas.

Environmental sustainability

Weaver Street is working toward being more environmentally sustainable by, for example, reducing its reliance on single-use plastic.

"We recently began our Bring it Back Jar program, which moved a group of our bulk products — dried fruit, nuts, snacks, etc. — to reusable glass jars," said McDonald. "We then invited our customers to return these jars as they finish them for us to clean and reuse. We imagine a future where our whole store operates in a sustainable fashion like this, in a closed-loop system that radically reduces or even eliminates our use of wasteful materials."

Weaver Street also has a lower carbon footprint from selling local goods rather than transporting products from other states or countries.

Racial equity

Following George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the subsequent protests, a group of Black Weaver Street employees called the E.Q.U.I.T.Y. Alliance (Empowering, Quality, Unification, & Inverting, the Tribulations of Yesteryear) initiated a conversation about racial equity, said McDonald.

The E.Q.U.I.T.Y. Alliance was created by Jameson Fuller, Breana Staley, Allanah Hines, and Portia Hackett to promote diversification with an aim to transform Weaver Street Market’s interactions with the community through equal representation of employees, producers, products, and work policies starting with the representation of the Black community. Their goal is to create a co-op where all people feel welcome to work, shop, and gather.

"One concrete result of these conversations was the creation of our Game Changer product line, which promotes minority-owned producers and aims to provide access to groups of people who have traditionally been under-represented in natural foods spaces," he said. "We can track this group of products to ensure that they grow and flourish over time, in the same way that we track our sales of local and organic products."

Making the effort to promote historically marginalized populations makes a big impact on creating equitable communities.

Giving to the community

Weaver Street gives to the community both by supporting local businesses and by donating to charities.

Among its many products, Weaver Street sold more than 1.2 million local eggs, 207 thousand containers of local berries, and 178 thousand loaves of local organic bread in fiscal year 2022, according to its annual report. Compared to a chain grocery store, it had an additional $12.4 million impact on the local economy.

Weaver Street Market also contributes to local nonprofits working to end food insecurity, fundraising $338 thousand in 2022, according to the report. Its Round Up program, which encourages customers to round up when paying for purchases, has given over $2 million in money and goods since 2015 to community food partners.

The co-op model means everyone has a voice

When’s the last time you wanted to make a change in a grocery store and felt like you could really do it? When was the last time you felt proud of your grocery store? At Weaver Street Market, shoppers and employees have a true voice because they are also the owners. The co-op model ensures that every voice is heard and that the people who shop and the people who work, can all have an impact. This ownership leads to creating a grocery store you can feel proud to be part of.

Shares of ownership in Weaver Street Market are $75 and can be purchased by visiting their website.

Buying a share is making a commitment to join the effort in growing a community, supporting local producers, increasing food access and equity, and providing living wages to those committed to providing high-quality food.

Members help lead the co-op through participation in board elections, owner surveys and advisory groups. In addition to the important leadership role, there are other owner benefits as well, including: