Rainbow Grocery Cooperative

Rainbow Grocery Cooperative is a worker-owned and run food cooperative located in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1975, Rainbow Grocery is a member of NoBAWC and the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives.HistoryAlthough it quickly became a secular project, Rainbow Grocery was started as a bulk food-buying program by an ashram that existed in San Francisco in the early 1970s. The buying program was coordinated by an ashram member who also worked for the People’s Common Operating Warehouse of San Francisco, a political project using food distribution as a form of community organizing and political education. The People’s Warehouse was striving to build a “People’s Food System,” including a network of small community food stores throughout San Francisco. Rainbow Grocery opened a storefront in the summer of 1975 on 16th Street in the Mission District of San Francisco. At this time, the People’s Food System already had two stores in San Francisco: Seeds of Life, in the lower Mission District, and Noe Valley Community Store. The ashram members who organized the opening of Rainbow Grocery did so largely by studying and copying the operations of the Noe Valley store. Rainbow Grocery opened with exclusively volunteer labor. After the first few months, there was enough income to pay the project’s two most active workers. As the store became increasingly successful, it was able to bring more workers on as paid staff, although people were generally not brought on to payroll until after several months of consistent volunteering. As the staff at Rainbow grew larger, the need for more defined organizational relationships also increased.