Kensington Community Food Co-op has closed, despite significant efforts to keep it going

The Kensington Community Food Co-op (KCFC) was a place where everyone was welcomed to shop. Co-op members, new community members in the gentrifying neighborhood, longtime residents of the River Wards. But by the end the KCFC’s life, hardly anyone did.

Now instead of a bounty of information about store happenings and latest sales, there is a simple RIP message on their website — “KCFC has permanently closed.”

And with that, KCFC’s 14-year mission to provide healthy food in Kensington, support local vendors, provide good jobs for neighborhood residents, establish a community-oriented space for neighbors, keep profits local, and drive investment in the community died, too.

“Every day I drive past the co-op and I feel a wave of grief,” said Rachael Kerns-Wetherington, an early KCFC member and former board member.

This was not KCFC’s first brush with closing.

In 2022, KCFC board president Nadia Schafer wrote to co-op members that after finally opening in 2020, the co-op had faced three years of sagging sales that had left its finances in a death spiral.

“We have reached a breaking point,” wrote Schafer. Unless the 1,500 co-op members raised at least $200,000, death was imminent.

“We need this amount to give us a shot at being successful; less than that will not allow us to unlock the full turnaround plan. Since we are structuring our campaign as ‘all or nothing,’ your pledge would not be collected unless we collectively reach the $200,000 target. If we do not raise this $200,000, I want to be very clear: KCFC will close its doors,” Schafer stated in her communication.

» READ MORE: In a ‘modern-day Rocky story,’ members step up to save Kensington Community Food Co-op

About 800 donors rallied, giving $204,750 in 10 days. Schaefer called it “a modern-day Rocky story.”

It was enough to hire Dennis Hanley, a food co-op consultant from Columinate, a national consulting cooperative. Hanley said he had turned around 27 stores in his almost five decades in the grocery business. When he came onboard in September 2022, he freely shared his low opinion of the co-op’s dire operation.

“Everything was wrong,” he said bluntly. Hanley said in order to thrive, a store has to have the right product mix, high-quality customer service, and the right prices.

“I’ve seen stores miss two out of three. KCFC was missing on three out of three,” Hanley said.

He was more concerned with the bottom line than KCFC’s mission. He set about putting the store on solid economic footing. From the onset he told the co-op he would need $50,000 more. Then he temporarily shuttered the store at the end of 2022 as part of a makeover, halting sales for several months but also conserving cash.

“Dennis had some specific ideas of what the co-op should be,” recalled Kerns-Wetherington. “He’s the expert and we tried to get behind him.”

On reopening day, Jan. 31, 2023, he offered savings, including a deep discount on eggs at $3.49 a dozen, when eggs had soared in price. It brought in steady business. “We sold 18 cases of eggs when in the past, we would sell one case a week,” Hanley said with sheer delight.

Once again, hope soared because the store looked as if it would be saved.

Since its conception, KCFC had a hard-knock life, but the board and its members, who are part owners, were gritty, refusing to quit despite overwhelming odds.

It took a decade to find and renovate a retail location for the co-op, which was founded in 2008. Cost overruns, even with volunteer labor, almost shuttered the store before it opened in 2019. Even then, paying customers were in short supply. When the pandemic hit in 2020, it at first brought an unexpected shoppers’ boom that was ultimately undone by a breakdown in the supply chain and food inflation in 2022.

Hanley thought KCFC’s problem was the high price point for products that didn’t reflect the store’s large Puerto Rican and African American community. He brought in popular items like chips, candy, and pineapple soda — the very opposite of KCFC’s mission to provide healthy food at affordable prices. Kerns-Wetherington called it a “massive disconnect” and feared Hanley was turning the co-op into a “conventional grocery store” with “conventional products.”

But where Schafer and Hanley had once been talkative and transparent, both are now refusing to comment. The search for the cause of the failure is being met by stony silence.

When asked for her take on why it failed, Schafer last week emailed, “I apologize, our lawyer has advised [us] to not speak on or off the record until the business is fully dissolved. My apologies!”

When asked for his explanation, Hanley texted an even more terse, “No.”

But the last annual report yields some answers. Even with the reopening in January 2023, the new products and a new bilingual staff that month, sales were in free fall. By July, the co-op was selling off its produce and debating plans to reopen as an office supply or restaurant supply store.

On the website, the board is still meeting, but KCFC has posted its own epitaph: “As a mission-based organization, Kensington Community Food Co-op sought to sustain a thriving, healthy community, a vibrant cooperative economy, an active and engaged membership, and a community educated in social, economic, and food justice.”

“It was painful to watch this thing spiral so far away from the original vision,” Kerns-Wetherington said.

Update: This version of the article has been corrected to include the correct spelling of Rachael Kerns-Wetherington, that she was an early but not founding member of KCFC as well as she was a former board member but never president of the board.