The Kodiak Harvest Food Cooperative has grown significantly in its almost 10-year journey. From a planning session in 2015, to sporadic pop-up produce sales to a permanent, brick-and-mortar shop.
Coop members pay membership fees and can vote on management decisions including board elections. Kodiak Harvest charges a one-time, $150 lifetime membership fee. Today, it has more than 700 members and you don’t need to be a member to shop at or sell to the coop.
Myra Scholze, the president of the Kodiak Harvest Food Coop’s board of directors, gave an overview of the organization’s history, which started with a planning session in 2015 at an event called Kodiak Strong and an initial $85,000 grant from Providence Kodiak Island Medical Center; then a steering committee was set up in 2016.
She presented to an almost full room of attendees from across the state who were in Kodiak for the Alaska Food Policy Council’s food festival and conference last week on March 28 & 29.
“Mostly that [grant] was like admin costs. So that wasn’t like securing a location or getting in any inventory," Scholze said.
For several years after receiving that grant, the coop hosted farmers’ markets and pop-up sales at the old Alaska Commercial Company store or the Kodiak Island Brewery.
For the last three years, since April, 2022, the coop has been operating out of a brick-and-mortar store on Selig Street. Now, the coop is open 42 hours a week with eight employees.
Rob Stauffer, the coop’s project director, said they’ve been able to offer weekly boxes of local produce, a variety of locally made goods and even bulk items like laundry detergent. He said selling larger quantities of detergent in reusable containers reduces the amount of plastic containers being dumped into Kodiak’s landfill.
“We’ve moved to bulk cleaners. We’re on an island and our landfill is very finite," he said. "So anything we can do to reduce that and getting the community involved in that has been a lot of fun.”
Stauffer told KMXT during a Talk of the Rock public affairs show in October, that local produce is the number one seller at the coop; followed by dairy products like cheese.
"Cheeses we always like to highlight. We have a really strong cheese community in Kodiak so it’s a big deal for us to find quality and interesting cheeses," Stauffer explained.
He said the coop offers products from 16 Kodiak producers, 12 producers from elsewhere in Alaska and goods from a couple of wholesalers like Azure Standard in Oregon.
Since 2023, the coop has also been providing local fishermen a consistent way to sell their seafood to Kodiak residents. Scholze told KMXT during a Talk of the Rock on March 18 that a handful of local fishermen are direct marketing their seafood at the coop.
“Even more so a few years ago, it was really hard to find seafood that was caught around Kodiak Island for sale in Kodiak," Scholze said. "So much of it is exported. And I think that is a common thread across a lot of communities in Alaska.”
The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute estimates that two-thirds or more of Alaska seafood is sold to international markets, and the rest is sold domestically in the U.S. It’s unclear how much of that stays in Alaska.
The coop’s sales have been growing year after year with a target for $1 million in 2025, which would be its best year to date. Last year, the coop reported roughly $845,000 worth of sales. About a quarter of that came from selling local goods from Kodiak.
Coop profits could eventually be given back to members as dividends. Stauffer and Scholze say they are also exploring a members’ reward program, similar to other grocery stores’ loyalty programs.
