When Weavers Way got started, the point was to get cheap food by cutting out the middleman, a/k/a The Man. Today, 40 years later, cheap food is everywhere, and it’s not just bruised apples and dented cans. Which isn’t all bad.

Take Mrs. T’s pierogies, which Janis Risch mentioned in her consideration of Co-op food prices in last month’s Shuttle. 

Some of you may remember when you could only buy pierogies at the church, and only in places where the church ladies knew how to make pierogies. But Ted Twardzik figured out how to mass-market a pretty good, and fairly cheap, facsimile of his mom’s pierogies. The rest is history.

Janis wrote: “The Co-op’s commitment to local sourcing means that locally-sourced pierogies from across the river in New Jersey costing $5.02 a pound have displaced Mrs. T’s, which cost $2.99 a pound, and are produced in Shenandoah, PA, in a plant that employs nearly 230 people.”

God bless the Twardzik family for keeping the company in Shenandoah. But that’s not why we don’t carry Mrs. T’s, which, as a matter of fact, does qualify as local under our 150-mile definition. We don’t carry Mrs. T's because we don’t have a distributor that would let us buy the small number of units we could actually sell in our little corner stores. Or, as Purchasing Manager Norman Weiss would say, we can’t get conventional grocery at good prices because we don’t have the volume.

Yes, the Man does cheap better than we do! In fact, you could argue that the original goal of Weavers Way has been accomplished by the likes of ShopRite.

Now, because we’re a cooperative, with decision-making residing in the membership, it would certainly be possible for us to get back to a single-minded emphasis on price. Unfortunately, we wouldn’t be very good at it. Meanwhile we and our nonprofit partner — here comes the plug! — Food Moxie, formerly Weavers Way Community Programs, have become pretty good at other things members have asked for over the years, like foods that are high quality and ethically produced, and helping consumers be mindful and informed. 

So we could put price ahead of all that. But Mrs. T’s would still be cheaper at ShopRite.