When you purchase Rochdale Farms products, you’re
touching the lives of hundreds of farm families in Minnesota and Wisconsin
and helping to support and strengthen a cooperative food supply chain.
Rochdale Farms is a cooperative project dedicated to helping small-scale farmers and farmer cooperatives market their hand-crafted products, grow sustainably, and support local communities. From farm to table, we have an infrastructure in place to help small to medium size producers and farmers grow their small-scale family farms by bringing artisan cheese and hand-rolled butter to market.
Our Mission
Our mission is to ensure that all of the small dairies and craft producers we partner with are able to consistently grow and continue to build on their generations of family farms. We bring Rochdale Farms products to a localized cooperatively-owned distribution center with short transportation distances within the Midwest. We are able to keep price points affordable while maintaining the unparalleled quality and integrity associated with Rochdale Farms products. We promote the full dynamic and transparent relationships we have with our cooperative partners and maintain these relationships on a daily basis throughout our local community.
Our History
Rochdale Farms Cooperative was founded in 2009. The name was chosen in honor of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, designers of the original consumer cooperative model launched in 1844 in Rochdale, England. Back then, the Rochdale Society set out to change the world. What they accomplished was revolutionary, bold and scoffed at by many of their contemporaries. Facing poverty and personal hardship in the tumult of the industrial revolution, the Rochdale Pioneers opened the first cooperatively organized store offering only five items on the shelves: flour, oatmeal, sugar, butter and candles. This cooperative structure exists to this day, growing and thriving in almost every state in the US, and abroad.
Exclusively in Cooperative Natural Grocers
Rochdale Farms products are exclusively found in cooperative natural grocers that are associated with the NCG (National Co-op Grocers). The NCG is a business services cooperative for retail food co-ops that represent 136 food co-ops operating in 180 stores in 37 states throughout the United States. Local economies flourish when a neighborhood co-op grocer opens to provide healthy food that travels shorter distances while providing channels for organic, bio-dynamic, non-GMO and rGBH-free farming methods to sustainably produce food to be sold in or nearby the community in which it was grown. These neighborhood co-op grocers give families the ability to spend their hard earned money on locally-grown, and sustainably produced food.
We also work collectively with our cooperative partners to develop new projects that showcase artisan products. Our Rochdale Farms brand can be found exclusively at cooperative grocers, farm-to-table restaurants and farmers markets across the Midwest.
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