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By Shylah Wolfe of Concordia Food Coalition
March 2023
The value of food coops goes beyond the balance sheet
This past March 22nd marked eleven years since 20,0 000 students congregated in Place Jacques-Cartier to demand a new vision for education and student rights. The movement grew so strong it ultimately brought the Quebec government to its knees. While the obvious benefits of that hard won battle seem easy to take for granted now, the less obvious legacy of the Maple Spring is how these students built a social movement that taught a generation about care, community and democratic economies. Off the heels of the Occupy Movement, and initially not being taken seriously by political leaders, the student body quickly saw that flaws in the establishment would require years of repair. Red square organizers discovered their collective power to disrupt and democratize the economy, and used it to institutionalize solidarity and self determination on campuses across the country.
Quebec is a bastion of the social economy. At Concordia, the history of cooperative organizing actually stretches back to the 1960s but was reinvigorated with the wave of student leaders that came to office in 2013. They targeted food services because the administration and private companies had consistently failed to meet the needs of students for decades. They held referendums to address solutions. The student body voted for cooperatives like the Hive and Reggie’s because they underscored the right of students to democratically control their own spaces and meet their common needs. Unlike corporations like Java U or Aramark, the Hive and Reggie’s are beholden to their members who own them and use them, not faceless shareholders living far away. What these businesses do, what they sell and the money they earn belongs to the students and community of nearly 10 000 members. So, they offer lowish prices, good quality food and drinks and free-to-low-cost space to student groups, as well as generally great vibes and a sense of community.
Recently though, the student-run co-op model may be falling out of favour. Some critics have been raising the alarm, saying that coops are inherently financially unviable, that they are a drain on the student coffers and time. Suggesting preference for an “easier” route for providing services to students, critics argue that these businesses would be safer and more reliable in the hands of private enterprise. Could these nay-sayers be right? Let’s be real, our campus food co-ops have not been celebrating yearly surpluses, and yeah it’s true cooperatives rely on more time and effort, from the people they serve, to run properly, than private business does.
But to dismiss the model on these premises is a grave mistake because it overlooks the realities of business and contradicts the mission of a social purpose organization:
First, it is vital to remember that financial struggle is not limited to cooperative enterprises. Nearly 80% of all food service businesses in Montréal close in the first 5 years. With boom-era profit margins at 2.6% at best, the struggle is real, no matter what the ownership structure. Concordia has seen this struggle not too long ago: the CSU-owned food corporations (that previously occupied the Reggie’s and the Hive locations) closed with debts over a million dollars. Debts that the CSU had to cover.
In contrast, cooperatives are twice as likely to survive 10 years of operation than conventional Quebec businesses. They tend to be more risk averse, adaptable, stable and resilient in crisis times and actually more likely to emerge as a result of crises, to meet needs failed by the private and public sectors.
COVID shutdowns, staffing shortages and skyrocketing inflation have crippled the restaurant industry indiscriminately. By September 2022 the entire Canadian restaurant sector shrunk 43%. In Québec specifically we lost almost 1000 restaurants since the pandemic began. Regular folks are just spending less on food and drinks outside the home than they did before March 2020. Even Aramark, the major food service provider on campus, negotiated with Concordia to reduce the financial losses they experienced. Keep in mind that Aramark has estimated guaranteed revenues as high as $6 million annually, thanks in large part to the captive Residence Meal Plan market. Along with these same challenges, our Concordia coops faced additional hurdles to COVID-19, due to Concordia’s very tight shutdown policies, restricting any possibility of creating alternative revenue streams (like take-out).
Importantly, some students might not realize that these coops are [TO WIT] the only student services on campus that do not have guaranteed annual revenues like Aramark or other food groups on campus. Although that’s normal for most businesses to survive on the sales they earn, Reggie’s and the Hive are the only two providers in the Concordia ecosystem actually doing so.
Expecting Reggie’s or the Hive to provide the same quality of service and experience the same stability as any other campus food group ignores the unique challenges they face that others don’t. Expecting the same or better from these cooperatives is effectively holding them to a higher standard than every other group, which seems illogical at best and unfair at worst.
Secondly, co-ops bring value to students that is not limited to their financial success – value which private corporations are unable or literally disincentivized to provide.
The previous iteration of Reggie’s (owned by CUSA-Corps) and the Java U formerly had no incentive or obligation to offer students anything which did not bring in a dollar. They had license to set any prices they wished for food. Any jurisdiction over the student right to use these spaces was negotiated through the Union privately, rather than at a public meeting of members.
The only lasting, meaningful impact these past iterations have had on student services has been the million dollar debt that students paid.
Coops on the other hand, are fundamentally required to be centred on, owned by and democratically controlled by the people who use them. Because they are centred on people, they prioritize that community of members before profit. Because they are owned and run by their members they serve to teach and train the members (in this case students) how to run them. In the last eight years these food coops have had hundreds of students learning entrepreneurship hands on by building and running the organizations (as directors, workers, zealous user members), and thousands more have been learning how to use their voices in democratic enterprise. They’ve been teaching students through praxis how to collaboratively learn and prime them for business, service, solidarity and community self determination. The costs of this education are pennies on the dollar compared to an MBA or Masters in Community Economic Development.
Lastly, the past 50 years of history in the student food movement at Concordia shows that every win for students and student services has involved some element of acquisition of physical space, autonomously and democratically run by students.
The student food movement as we know it, started two decades ago, led by Q-PIRG, le Frigo Vert and the People’s Potato, was able to make their greatest strides by securing space on campus to produce and transform food. These hard-won battles required the support and ownership from the community, and as result the successful projects became community-owned social purpose organizations. If the Hive and Reggie’s were privately owned businesses, they would not be in the hands of the student body. This movement has also definitively set the tone and standard for environmental sustainability and food system justice at Concordia. Student leaders have time and again modeled a mission to transform food services towards equity, justice and food sovereignty. In the last decade, food cooperatives have played a pivotal role to further that mission and act as keystones in the vibrant campus food network.
The tension between providing affordable, high quality food while simultaneously providing liveable wages to workers is palpable in this capitalist hellscape, yet these coops have persisted despite myriad struggles to play a pivotal role in , served thousands of litres of fair trade coffee and cheap beer and reinforced the fabric of the campus food system we take for granted today. Without them, we may be a decade behind where we are now.
To support Reggies fundraising campaign go to www.renewreggies.ca and come to the Revive party on March 28th.
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