Seattle’s Central Co-op said "... It is clear that your company has lost support from our community and that people are showing preference to other product lines." Same for other co-ops, and good for all of them.

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Two Months On From Hobby Lobby Ruling, Grocery Co-ops Dump Eden Foods Products From Shelves
By Clare O'Connor, August 29, 2014

Two months ago, the national news cycle seemed dominated by the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling and its ensuing backlash.

Like Hobby Lobby, organic food company Eden Foods sued the U.S. Government over Obamacare’s employee birth control mandate, but got off comparatively lightly.

The Michigan-based natural products outfit avoided the same months-long media glare, rallies and protests that plagued Hobby Lobby after SCOTUS ruled the DIY company could cite religious reasons for not covering all forms of birth control on worker insurance plans.

Eden Foods did not, however, escape without a boycott effort by some of the country’s best-known regional grocery co-ops.

Madison, Wisconsin’s two-store Willy Street co-op this week announced it’d be removing nine of Eden Foods’ popular products from its shelves after a comment period. 57 per cent of shoppers — all of whom own a stake in the grocery business — wanted all Eden Foods items dropped from Willy Street.

The co-op’s director Kirstin Moore wrote a letter to Eden Foods founder and sole owner Michael Potter, a devout Catholic and the arbiter of the company’s corporate values.

“Please stop allowing personal values to get in the way of the common ground you share with your diverse array of customers and help us return our focus to the high quality of your food,” she wrote.

Moore added that Eden Foods, which itself started life as a co-op in 1969, “ought to understand how some of our consumers may draw the conclusion that today’s Eden Foods — the Eden Foods that filed suit to retain control over how certain employees may use the healthcare compensation Eden Foods provides — has fallen short of our cooperative values.”

San Francisco’s 40-year-old Other Avenues co-op has opted to remove all traces of Eden Foods from its store, writing in an open letter to customers:

“While we appreciate Eden Foods commitment to other political causes such as the non-GMO movement, we are saddened by their decision to fight against providing basic reproductive health services to their own employees, and cannot in good conscience continue to carry their products so long as they continue to oppose this fundamental right.”

Seattle’s Central Co-op has removed about 80% of its Eden Foods stock from shelves, but not until shoppers had already started voting against Eden Foods by buying products by competitors:

“We…always encourage our owners and customers to vote with their dollars by supporting companies that they respect. This is what we suggested our community do when outcry arose over your action last year; and recent renewed interest in your case was cause for us to review sales of Eden products and explore what options we might have that equally (or better) reflect our product guidelines. During this review we found that our community has indeed been voting with their dollars and that 80 percent of the Eden products on our shelves have failed to keep up with the sales of competing products. It is clear that your company has lost support from our community and that people are showing preference to other product lines.”

Other regional grocery co-ops which have dropped some or all of Eden Foods’ product line include Glut Food in Mount Rainier, Maryland and North Carolina’s Weaver Street Market in the town of Carrboro.

The issue remains up for discussion at Brooklyn’s famous Park Slope Food Co-op. At their most recent meeting this week, shareholders decided to send a letter of protest and concern to Eden Foods before making a decision. At Montana’s Bozeman Food Co-op, owner-member votes on the subject are still being tallied.

Eden Foods has been proactive in its attempts to ensure its organic and natural products stay on shelves at as many independent grocers as possible.

In July, the company sent a letter to members of the Independent Natural Food Retailers Association, a consortium of 160 grocery stores and small chains nationwide.

In the mailing, Eden Foods explained its healthcare stance without mentioning contraceptives or birth control specifically. The letter urged grocers to consider the company’s healthy, organic, GMO-free wares above all else.

So far, larger nationwide grocery chains remain on board with Eden Foods.

In July, a spokesperson for Whole Foods, Eden’s biggest supplier, told Forbes that it’ll keep selling the Michigan company’s organic goods, but that shoppers have every right to “vote with their dollars.”
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