The wonderfully named Naked Larder bulk buying club in South London is the focus of an excellent blog for the Food Co-ops section of Sustain’s website.
Phili Denning, the founder of Naked Larder, has shared sixteen posts (as of August 2020) about her early steps with the project. She explains her motivation as being two-fold: minimising plastics in her grocery sourcing and also maximising savings through bulk purchases. Phili runs through how she canvassed friends with similar motivations to build a group of potential members, checked out the pros and cons of different suppliers and worked through a series of practical considerations before finally reaching the stage of feeling ready to place her first order. It all builds toward a really useful insight into what starting a bulk buying club can be like.
Whilst Phili’s buying club takes a micro-enterprise format that differs from the collectively run, non-profit model discussed at this site, many of the issues she covers are still just as relevant to groups.
Sustain is a UK non-profit alliance for better food and farming and has been running an initiative to encourage the formation of small scale co-ops for several years. For more details on their ‘Food Co-ops Toolkit’, see our Resources page.
About this site
This site aims to encourage and support the setting up of further bulk buying clubs and small food co-ops in Ireland by sharing the experience of individuals who have operated a ‘pop-up wholefoods’ model over a number of years.