Natural Harvest Food Co-op started as a buying club about three years before the storefront opened. The first buying club meeting was held in June 1976. This group started with just a few families and individuals who came together because they wanted to buy nutritious whole foods at more reasonable prices than were available locally.
Eventually, this buying club grew to a point where this method of purchasing whole food products became difficult to manage and operate. The buying club decided to further co-operate by starting a retail store. This became the Natural Harvest Food Co-op in December 1979.
In January 1996, the co-op made a major move from downtown Chestnut Street to a newly constructed log building on the south shore of Bailey Lake. It was a big jump in space, and membership and sales have continued to grow every year since!
Continuing in the spirit of hard weather construction, we just added a new set of electronic doors in January 2009 to make the store more welcoming and energy efficient.
To read more, check out this 2008 story from Hometown Focus.
