Willy Street Co-Op aims to become Heart of the Northside

 Abha Thakkar and members of the Northside Planning Council discuss plans for ensuring Willy North will best serve the community. (Melissa Behling/Madison Commons)

The sky was painted with ominous clouds and the chill in the air whispered that winter is approaching. But the excitement at the Grand Opening of Willy North was enough to keep the crowd warm. Anya Firszt, general manager of Willy Street Co-Op, welcomed community members from Madison’s Northside to celebrate.

“Despite the dreary weather, nothing can dampen my spirits or my enthusiasm today,” Firszt said. “We are here to celebrate cooperation, community, job creation and plain old hard work.”

“Hard work” may have been an understatement. Pierce’s Northside Market closed in May, leaving the community no accessible grocery stores. But Willy Street Co-Op had already been planning to move into the vacant building for several months. With the help of the Northside Town Center, Pierce’s, the construction team and various community partners, Willy North opened just two months later on Aug. 15, making this “the shortest expansion time in Willy Street history,” Firszt said.

The Co-Op was celebrating more than a new storefront. The Co-Op sees themselves as providing a service to the neighborhood that includes a dialogue about their needs. Board president Holly Fearing said Willy Street had been looking to open a third location since August 2014, and the board decided the Northside Town Center was a perfect match.

Northside community members gather outside for the Grand Opening ceremony. (Melissa Behling/Madison Commons)

”We started seeing how much of a match this [site] would be for our mission and our values as a co-op,” Fearing said. “Being able to come to this neighborhood and prevent it from being in a food desert, we knew it would really fulfill our work to serve the community.”

Abha Thakkar, Interim Director of the Northside Planning Council, said she was pleased to welcome Willy North to the emerging Northside food innovation corridor. Developing this food innovation corridor has been NPC’s main focus and includes programs like Food Enterprise and Economic Development Kitchens – a five-kitchen facility just down the street from Willy North where community members can go to prepare food or take classes about working in the food industry.

“Everyone stretched themselves to make this work, and it was community development at its very best,” Thakkar said. “A grocery store is the heart of a community, and we must continue to work to make sure our diverse neighborhoods are served well by this store.”

Brendon Smith, director of communications for Willy Street Co-Op, said one way Willy North is working to best serve the community is by keeping its products affordable. Willy Street Co-Op carries a wide selection of natural and organic products, which typically cost more than conventional grocery store items.   

“Transparency is important to us - when we were talking about opening another store at this location, we asked the community and the overwhelming response was ‘yes,’” he said. “But there was concern about making sure we offered affordable products.”

To acknowledge this community need, Willy Street worked closely with Pierce’s to determine reasonable prices for consumers in the area.  Willy North sells most products for the same prices or cheaper than Pierce’s, Smith said.  Willy Street also does periodic price checks throughout Madison to make sure their prices are comparable to conventional stores.

Anya Firszt, Patricia Butler and Abha Thakkar share the honor of cutting the ribbon. (Melissa Behling/Madison Commons)

Another step Willy North has taken to promote affordability is accepting Women, Infants, and Children EBT cards. This separates Willy North from their other locations in Madison that were not able to stock the products required for a store to be WIC-compatible.  

“Pierce’s had WIC, and it was part of that affordability component, so we thought it was very important to have at this site,” Smith said.

Thakkar said moving forward, NPC has high expectations for itself to “keep examining the culture of the store to make sure it’s accessible to everyone, no matter their shopping needs.”  She said this includes addressing the ongoing transportation needs. NPC hopes to establish a program to place cart corrals throughout the neighborhood for people who don’t have a car to transport their groceries home. 

“Historically, the neighbors who walk to the store will often take grocery carts back with them because they have small children and a lot of groceries and they can’t really carry all of it,” Thakkar said. “But that kind of makes them into criminals and thieves, when really it’s a basic need to be able to carry your groceries home.

Placing cart corrals throughout the neighborhood would allow customers to walk a cart to Willy North, to shop and then to walk their cart of groceries back home. Thakkar is confident NPC will be able to find funding for this initiative; she said it’s just a matter of finding the proper sites to place the corrals.

In addition to the cart corrals, Thakkar mentioned NPC hopes to offer nutrition classes at Willy North in addition to the classes being held at FEED Kitchens. “Nobody wants to be patronizing about it and assume that people need to be educated to eat well,” she said. “But it’s just to give people the opportunity to learn about all the different foods available in a natural food store, how they might want to integrate them into their diet and some of the long-term benefits of that.”

As a cooperative, Willy Street shows concern for the community. Aside from just providing groceries, the store is dedicated to listening to its customers and stocking the products they request. For the Grand Opening, Willy North stocked 250 new products based on requests from the community.

“We really wanted to be responsive to what the neighborhood was looking for,” Smith said. “We want this to be a store where everyone in the neighborhood can shop.”

The Co-Op aims to listen to customers, even in product selection. (Melissa Behling/Madison Commons)