Hillsdale welcomes Food Front with support, co-op members

Grocery cooperative exceeds its expectations when it moves into former Wild Oats space

By Peter Korn

The Portland Tribune, Sep 17, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Peter Korn / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Kimberly Ross is front end manager of the new Hillsdale Food Front Cooperative Grocery, which opened two weeks ago and already has over 1300 memberships.

Anyone who thinks the idea of a cooperative grocery store died with the demise of patchouli and love beads hasn't been to Hillsdale recently.

That's where the new Food Front Cooperative Grocery has exceeded the most optimistic expectations of its member/owners.

The new store opened Sunday, Aug. 31, with 856 people having already bought $150 memberships. Kimberly Ross, the store's front end manager, says when the new store was announced early in 2008, staff hoped they could recruit at least 400 members before the opening.

And in the two weeks that the new Food Front has been in business, 500 additional people have signed up for memberships. By comparison, the original Food Front, long a fixture in Northwest Portland, recruited 334 new owners last year.

“We’re beyond targets now,” Ross says.

Ross, who helped staff a booth at Sunday Farmers Markets behind the store through the summer, says that on most Sundays at least 30 people would sign up for memberships, and most had a similar rationale — they wanted a grocery to which they could walk or bike.

And, Ross says, they were drawn to the idea of a grocery that would become a neighborhood fixture.

The new Food Front renovated a store in a Hillsdale shopping center that had been abandoned by Whole Foods, which had bought out Wild Oats, which had taken over the grocery for years run by Nature’s Fresh Northwest.

In fact, Ross says a discarded sign kept in the new Food Front's business office serves as a reminder of what the store needs to do to succeed.

The sign, which was posted at the store shortly before its October 2007 closing as a Wild Oats Market, announces the closing positively, “so we can better serve you through the other Whole Foods Market and Wild Oats Market locations.”

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