Assessing the performance of food co-ops in the US

Didier Alia (), Ani Katchova and Timothy Woods ()

No 230140, 2016 Annual Meeting, February 6-9, 2016, San Antonio, Texas from Southern Agricultural Economics Association

Abstract: Food cooperatives (co-ops) as a key component of the local food network play an increasingly important role in the US food system. Co-ops use various strategies to promote local products, ensure a greater commitment of members, and the rofitability and sustainability of the business. This paper assessed the effectiveness of these strategies as perceived and appreciated by co-ops' members using survey data from a national study on eight large food cooperatives in the U.S. The survey identifies a wide range of attributes related to store and product characteristics, and marketing and management strategies. It asks interviewees to rank their co-op on these attributes on a Likert-scale of 0-4. Using Principal Component Analysis, we aggregate and combine information from the large number of rankings into a six major categories. Next, exploiting the hierarchical structure of the data with members nested within their respective co-ops, we use Hierarchical Linear Modeling methods to identify the factors that determine the perceived performance of co-ops. The results show that in general member has a strong positive perception of the performance of their co-ops in term of quality of the products, quality of the management and the service, and the physical quality of the store. We also find there is a lot heterogeneity among co-ops and member socio-demographic and economic characteristics are strongly correlated with their perception.

Keywords: Agribusiness; Community/Rural/Urban Development; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety; Marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-mkt
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:saea16:230140

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.230140

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