Grounds for Change – How a Cup of Coffee Makes for a Better Economy

I do think it's inherently political in that saying workers should have rights or people should be able to afford to live where they work is unfortunately a political statement. And it's not our main goal, but it is in our mission, vision, and values. And we also talk about it when we talk with some of our certifiers about You know, we're we're big for Ithaca, we're small for uh a business in the country overall, and how can you try to advocate for living wage more broadly when you're the size Gimme is, or how can you participate? in human rights and environmental due diligence when you're the size that Gimme is.

And I think all of that is part of being a worker-owned co-op and is part of what the workers who own the co-op want to keep doing Welcome to the Ithaca Local Economy Podcast. We're here today with Claire Christensen, who is the executive director of Gimme Coffee local coffee favorite in Ithaca and um very interesting business model, not just for coffee shops, but for businesses of all sorts. So welcome, Claire. We're very happy to have you here today. Thank you. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the origin of Gimme Coffee, how it started, what its position is here in it.

Ethica right now. Yeah, so Gimme Coffee was founded in 2000 originally just as a coffee shop. The coffee shop that's on Cuga Street was our first cafe. And then the following year started roasting our own coffee to some extent, opening other locations. And Gimme has a founder, uh, Kevin Cudamack, who was a sole proprietor of the corporation with a lot of other folks who worked for the business. for 22 years. And so he ran the business and hired roasters and so on for a very long time in Ithaca. Until he decided he didn't want to run the business anymore and looked to find an exit strategy.

A lot of coffee shops of Gimme's size get sold to Venture Capital or one of the big four coffee companies, which are mostly um multinationals uh and he didn't want the business to disappear and he wanted everyone to be able to keep working here. Um so he looked into uh conversion to a cooperative Starting in around 2019. And uh we finally converted in 2022 um and uh are now a worker-owned co-op So the employees own the business. So you started in 2019. I s I assume the pandemic shutdown had some impact on the length of time for conversion there.

Yes, m most people do it within about a year, depending on how complex the business is and how many people you're trying to talk to. The fastest I've ever heard of is three months. But the first step you do is feasibility and feasibility basically asks two really important questions. One of them is, do the employees want to own the business and do they have the skills necessary to own and run the business? Um, which depends a lot on what the business was like before conversion. And then the other question is this is sort of like a a progressive version of a leveraged buyout.

The business is going to take out a loan on the business to buy the business. And so the question is, can your company afford to pay back that loan for purchasing the business. And we started doing feasibility in uh spring of twenty twenty. So we'd just done all the the work of it together. I think we had a worked with a partner and we gave them all of our, you know, financials and here's what the appraisal of the business is and et cetera. And then Immediately after we did that, we closed every cafe. So we we basically had to wait for um things to restart again before we could start even ask the question, can the business afford to buy the business?

So you do you had to do that effectively twice then? Well we already because we had our original feasibility and appraisal and so on, we were able to rely on a lot of that information, but we Yeah, we submitted to lenders in 2022, early 2022, all of the information you have to give your lender. Here's all the things the team decided to do during the cooperative transition. So we had a transition team that was asked questions like Who can be a member owner? What do you have to do to be a member owner? And then we had to have a lawyer prepare all of those bylaws, and that's what you submit to your lender to get the final loan.

So it took us a long time to get to the point where we were confident that we could say, yes, we can submit to a lender. We're definitely like all five cafes are back open and working regular hours again Um and they'll be able to look at our financials. So so that's so you said you have five cafes that uh at the time that you did your conversion. How large was the business, you know, Brock what your revenues were at that time or how many employees you had? Yeah, our employee count was around 55. At the time of conversion, we're at about sixty three to sixty five right now, which we extended hours at a few cafes since then is the main change.

And sorry, you asked two halves of a question. What your revenues were the approximately? Yeah, so we're we were right around four million dollars, I think, at the time of the conversion, which a business of that size in a community of of this size you feel like a pretty big business, but the vast majority of what we spend goes to payroll. So we actually have a very low bottom line. And that's why We uh we had to wait so long to be able to submit to the lender to reach a point where we were like, yes, we're profitable again, at least a little bit profitable, we can send that information. to our lender.

So when you were in the process of doing the conversion, obviously your employees at the time, uh you said you had about fifty-five at the time. Uh-huh. They had to have been playing a very active role in all of that. What was the you know, what was their f the general feeling? Were they excited about it? Were was there um, you know, some anxiety around it? Were there pitfalls that you r that you ran into? Absolutely I think when we first presented it to employees, we did several all-employee meetings where we said this is what we're thinking of doing.

And then we asked people to volunteer to join a paid transition team that would make the decisions about how many people are gonna be on the board of directors, everything that's gonna go in your bylaws. And then that transition team kept having those all staff meetings. At that point they were volunte you know, like optional meetings that people would come to if they were interested to find out what we were thinking about the future of the business. And I think initially we had incredibly good feedback, especially considering that we were presenting it in like September of 2020.

Overall, people liked their jobs. They wanted their jobs to continue. A lot of Gimme had been operating independent of Kevin for a long time. A lot of the departments were effectively run by the people you know, the manager of that department who was making decisions of the safe scale that they'd make in the future. So people weren't very worried about, you know, what happens to the bakery? Do I have the skills or knowledge to run the bakery, they were already running the bakery. I think the main thing that we had difficulty with, and this is I think fairly common in a co-op transition is that when we first presented it to employees, employees said, Well, but I don't have ten thousand dollars because when you say we're going to buy the business I think the impression that people get is you individually need to have the savings such that you could help us buy the business.

So we spent a really long time explaining the how the financials would work, that there would be a small buy-in for you to buy a share individually. But we're getting a loan on the value of the business to buy the business. So you don't personally have to have that kind of cash on hand. And I think that was the one of the biggest hurdles because you see a lot of businesses turning over uh in town and they're usually bought by maybe one employee who has the ability to put up the cash or get the the loan on their own personal guarantee. And a cooperative doesn't have a personal guarantee.

So there's no one individual who like is taking out a loan at the bank on their own social security number or anything like that. But that was hard to explain to people at first. But everyone was really excited about all of the operational parts of it, all of the management parts of it, the governance parts of it. People were really enthusiastic about participating. And it was just a matter of doing that conversation about how the financials of a cooperative work. Right. So so they did have to put in a little bit of money or they could put in a little bit of money if they wanted to.

Was it was it required? So it is required. This is most cooperatives have a set of steps you have to go through to become a member owner. Some cooperatives like Equal Exchange is a workaround co-op and they are 100% They're not just 100% work-around, all workers must be owners. So if you get hired at EqualExchange, you must buy in Um and gimme it's optional and the steps you take are that you um a board or a committee meeting You attend an orientation to learn what your rights and responsibilities are. You take a small sort of oral exam to s like recap what you learned in orientation.

And you work here for at least a year and for at least 1040 hours. So ha at least part-time. Or if you work part-time in that year, you would be eligible at your one year anniversary. And if you work less than part-time, you'd be eligible somewhat after your first year anniversary. Um but we don't hire for part-time roles, so it's really sort of irrelevant. Um we only hire full time. Uh and you pay in uh $1,300, which is twenty-five dollars a week for a year, which you can do as a payroll deduction. Um, so it doesn't have to be done up front. And this is relatively low. for a cooperative and our transition team talked for a long time about it.

We talked to some cooperatives. We talked to a solar panel installer cooperative whose buy-in was five thousand dollars. We also talked to people who had much longer waits before you could be a member owner. You could had to wait two years or three years. Um there was a construction company I think where people had to wait five years before they could buy in. And That just didn't fit with what we were hoping the cooperative would do for our employees and who would be able to participate. So we pick the dollar value so that it would be accessible to everyone at the business and we picked the timeline similarly so that we felt that people would Understand what they were getting into.

Right. And have worked at the business for a while, but we didn't want it to be an obstacle where it's just like only ten people who've worked here for five years or something can be member owners. Right. So what percentage of your current employees um our our member owners at this point. That is a question for the board in that they keep they keep gr statistics on that. So I'm gonna be vague. I believe about 25% of our employees are currently not eligible, so they haven't worked here for a full year yet. And of the remaining 75% of employees, just under half are currently member owners.

And then a few other people are are somewhere on the transition. They've done some of the steps, but not necessarily all of them. And was that been fairly consistent from the time of your transition since twenty two? It's been fairly consistent. I think one of the difficulties we have, and our the people who helped us with our cooperative transition warned us about this, is that one of the benefits of a worker-owned co-op is profit sharing But because we're paying back the loan to buy the business, a lot of what would otherwise be profit goes to that loan.

So it's very hard to say to someone, there will be profit sharing in hopefully two or three years, but currently Those numbers are real small, but you know, you should buy in because you care about governance. Um Right. So it's a harder sell. We have a membership committee that works hard. Sort of explain to people what you get as a benefit at the moment, since you don't get a huge, you know, cash payment back to us. Right. Right. So yeah, it's been pretty consistent and our our cooperative transition specialist told us, oh, in a couple or three years when you start having actual patronage, members are going to talk about their patronage to non-members and people will see a lot more benefit to buying in.

So we do expect that to go up in the future. But at the moment it's been pretty stable. Well I can see so I can see that there might be something of a disconnect too between current members who are using what would be profits to pay down the loan and then a new member coming in who's just going to get the profits. Is that is that a tension that is something that like how do you resolve that tension? I think part of how you resolve it is you really think about the future stability of the business. Everyone will get those profits when those profits show up.

And you won't have paid in any more than anyone else. Everyone will have paid in the same amount. It's just a matter of when they paid it in And the profits are distributed based on hours worked in a year. So uh there's um there's no like stratification of how that profit sharing works. It's not related to what your current pay is or what your role is. It's just how many hours you worked here. And I think overall people who are involved now are excited to be involved now because of the governance, because people want to be on the board, they want to be making those contributions.

And we'll be having different kinds of conversations when there's more profit to share. But I don't think that At the moment there's not much tension there. So what are some of the benefits you said that, you know, that you were an employee coming in now who wasn't going to necessarily get money in their pocket right away. What are some of the other benefits that they get from being part of this worker co-op Some of the benefits are that they can run for the board and be a member of the board of directors, which uh you have to be a member, owner of the co-op to run for the board. um and be on the board and make those decisions.

You can vote on a variety of issues and you get consulted on a variety of other issues. So our operating plan and our budget, all member owners get consulted on those. We share them with everyone annually and we say, hey, this is what we're thinking of doing next year. This is what we're seeing. And uh and everyone can give their feedback on that budget and operating plan. And one of the real concrete things at the moment is that uh we have a rally fund, which is that we donate a percentage of profits from some of our coffee blends to organizations and we poll employees and members about what um about what they want to do with those funds.

So last year our members said that their top concerns were migration and housing and the board committee that decides how to allocate those funds allocated it to An organization in Buffalo Justice for Migrant Families that works with migrant families in that area Um but also from our area, anyone who who is detained will be going to Buffalo and will be served by that at nonprofit. And so that's something that we get to do every year and everyone gets to give their feedback on. And I think it's one of the most concrete examples of Like, you know, this is my opinion about what the issues of the day are and here's where I want that money to go.

That's great. So when somebody goes in to get a job at a coffee shop, which just you know, it's it's just like a regular job. It's you're gonna be a barista at a coffee shop, but you're really working for the community. in a in a very real sense here when you when you're working in a cooperative when you're working for Gimme Coffee, which is amazing. So when you have uh you have these governance meetings, how often do those occur and What kind of a commitment is required from your member owners? The member owners aren't required to attend any meetings, but we have two all-member meetings a year that are scheduled that are like budget operating plan.

Here's how everything is looking. We can have other all-member meetings if we want to, if things come up that are urgent. For example, if we were to open a new location Um members would need to be consulted on that and we might not be able we might not be able to wait. If there's a lease, we might not be able to wait for the next scheduled all-member meeting. And the board meets currently monthly for short meetings and then quarterly they have a longer a meeting where they go in more depth on the financials. Financial transparency is a really important part of this.

Uh to make everything work properly. How is that handled? Since you only have two member meetings a year, is there something that all the member owners get and is there Do the non-member owners get it as well? Because you only got about half of your m half of your member owners are half of your employees are are owners. What ha what does that look like in the in the coffee shop itself? Yeah, we share that information with anyone who wants to come to a meeting. So anyone can attend if they want to. They're not closed meetings. And we also prepare a variety of handouts and you know, here's what the financial picture is sort of materials for folks.

I think the difficulty with it is that we're a roaster with five cafes. our financials are somewhat complicated. We have, you know, twenty six years of balance sheet baggage of, you know, this is still on the balance sheet because of something somebody bought in 2018. And so it's taken us some work to figure out how to invite people into those conversations about financials in a way that people find informative enough. but also welcoming enough, not condescending, but not too technical. And I went to some uh Democracy at Work Institute trainings about financial transparency to talk about this And we've done some modeling based on some things that Dawi does.

So we once did a here's the where the cost of a latte goes. Here's how much labor in the cafe, what percentage of Of the cost of the latte goes to labor in the cafe, goes to the roasters, goes to the people who package the coffee, goes to insurance, etc. And and so you you do it in in sort of pie chart style to say here's where that goes to try to break down that financial statement into something that's a real clear picture of here's what happens with every latte you sell. So All the employees have the same information as hard. They don't always show up or take it, but yeah.

Maybe they're not interested, or they just wanna Make their coffee. That's all they want to do. That's okay. Or bake their rolls. Right. And that's that's why it's valuable to be a part and to not require member ownership is that you can have all kinds of commitments or If something comes up in someone's life and they're like, I just don't want to deal with it right now, like, don't have the time, they don't have to. You can withdraw from membership and rejoin in the future if you want to also. So we've had a couple of folks do that where they were like, I just need my buy-in back Or, you know, for some other reason.

And then uh they're always welcome to rejoin in the future. So as an owner, if you s if if you have a business and you sell it, a lot of times you sell it for a profit or hopefully you sell it for a profit. But if you're a member owner Do you sell it for a profit or do you just get your buy-in back? So if you leave while the co-op uh is still operating, you get your buy-in back and you get any patronage profit sharing that was still owed to you um for hours you worked and we can pay patronage over several years. So it might be this year's patronage you'll get at the end of the year.

So if someone leaves in June, they might get their patronage the following April for that half year they worked. Um but we also could have patronage still due to them from the previous year. Because you can pay it out over time. So you get all of that back. If we sell the business, there's a really common cooperative practice of trying to put an obstacle here. um to make it less likely that people will sell the business to a venture capital company. And gimme's is that if you sell the business, profit from selling the business goes to everyone who's worked here in the last certain number of years.

So I don't remember what the number is offhanded, something like five years. So the idea is that you have to share that profit with everyone who contributed to the success of the business to make it less likely that you'll get into a situation where you know, there are only ten member owners left. They decide to sell the business and they get all the profit. A lot of co-ops also have something where they offer sort of right of first refusal to other mission aligned businesses. So if we were to get a c an offer from Nestle and we felt like we wanted to take it For whatever reason, we would offer to sell it to other cooperatives or other mission aligned businesses for the same price that Nestle had offered.

Which is another way that people try to keep keep that money local and encourage cooperative businesses to keep being cooperatives or keep being at least progressive or sustainable businesses. So what happens if an employee or a member owner, even perhaps worse, is underperforming? So we have just cause is our standard practice for all departments at GIME. So we have a just cause disciplinary action process that we'd follow in the normal sort of human resources way of progressive discipline or performance improvement plan or et cetera. If you leave the business, your membership in the business automatically ends.

You can only own a share if you work here. So if somebody voluntarily resigns or if they're f God forbid, fired, then their membership would end at that point. And then they if they're a member owner, they receive back whatever money they just as you described earlier. Exactly. It's it is also something that cooperatives sometimes have trouble explaining to um to people and we had some difficulty with this early on where we would have some people in a department who would be member owners and some people who'd be regular employees and the employee would say, Well, you're just gonna side with the member owner because they own the business Or, Well, they have this kind of power of ownership and you're like, No, we're still a regular business and you still have the ability to to speak up or to say you don't like you know, something they've been saying and you disagree with them.

And a member owner doesn't have the kind of power that a member owner has at a sole proprietorship or that kind of business. So what Why did wh why did Gimme choose this particular structure of member ownership as opposed to say like um an employee stock ownership program, which is also a very common sort of cooperative structure? Yeah, so the the ESOP structure is relatively expensive to run and maintain. It works really well for businesses that have somewhat more employees. People usually say the cutoff is around fifty employees, so we're at the we were at the very low end of You could maybe, maybe consider an ESOP.

And we decided that we wanted members to have more input than that, and we wanted members to be able to serve on the board and participate in governance in a more direct way. So we chose the worker-owned model instead. Um and and also I think we were like, well, would we rather the money go to the administration of a complex program or would we rather at a 401k. And so we decided to structure it as a worker owned co-op and indeed we did implement a 401k right after transition. Co-ops, I think, are kind of having a moment now. There seems to be a resurgence of interest in them and, you know, people sort of owning the places where they work and and and keeping things more local kind of in general.

And of course Ithaca is right at the forefront of all of this, which is great. And I think Gimme Coffee with your with your model is kind of right at the forefront of what's happening in Ithaca. As a as a way to sort of mitigate wealth inequality. Do you think that do you think of Gimme Coffee as being inherently political in its structure and in its governance and in its sort of mission? Or is that Is that maybe more of a distraction from from what you're you know, from from the actual work that you're doing? I do think it's inherently political in that saying workers should have rights or people should be able to afford to live where they work is unfortunately a political statement.

And it's not our main goal, but it is in our mission, vision, and values. And we also talk about it when we talk with some of our certifiers about, you know, we're we're big for Ithaca. We're small for a business in the country overall and how can you try to advocate for living wage more broadly when you're the size gimme is or how can you participate in human rights and environmental due diligence when you're the size that Gimme is. And I think all of that is part of being a worker-owned co-op and is part of what the workers who own the co-op want. to keep doing.

Yeah, well as you as we we kinda touched on earlier, a big part of what Gimme does is is very community and environmentally focused. It's not just about paying a living wage, which in Ithaca now is slightly over twenty five dollars an hour. They understand it. That you know, that's very high, but I'm sure it's not unusual across the country that's actually what people need in order to make rent and by food is probably more with the the way things are going right now. But gimme coffee also uh has a great deal of interest in being environmentally conscious.

And so you source your beans from fair trade organic producers and you have environmentally responsible bags even that you know that can be recycled. How are you And especially with the climate as it is right now, because our economies are you know, everything is just sort of skyrocketing and and getting things in there. How is Gimme as a a relatively small business who's doing this, how are you responding to to these new pressures? It's really tough. If we were in a big city, it would be really easy to have an identity as a like uh fair trade, organic, bird-friendly coffee company and appeal to a s really specific audience.

But in Ithaca, we're both appealing to that audience and we're your local neighborhood coffee shop. We're like the place you go after school the place you meet people on the weekend. And so we really try to balance being welcoming for a a whole community with what we can do with the Fair Trade Organic. bird friendly standards and what we can do that doesn't I mean specialty coffee is always too expensive for some people. What we can do that we tr where we try not to price people out of the market and we can still offer a a brewed coffee at a reasonable price and and it's it is tough.

It's it's tough to communicate it with customers. It's tough to explain why we think it's valuable. And we focus on the places where we feel like we can have an impact and make a difference. So You mentioned our coffee bags and that's something where we used to do compostable coffee bags, but then Ithaca stopped doing industrial industrial plastic compost. for very understandable reasons on the part of the composters who were getting all kinds of incorrect items mixed in. So we looked at some of the packaging studies on this that said that because of the lack of access to industrial compost, actually recyclable bags that can be recycled at the supermarket are going to be a a lower environmental cost in production.

And they're more likely to get recycled than the compostable bags are to get composted. So the folks who worked on that project were looking at some of those white papers on different kinds of plastics and what kind of plastic is more eco-friendly as much as it can be And trying to make that happen in a way where also we're not gonna price out everyone in our audience and make our coffee inaccessible to people who want it. And it's a tough balancing act. We are really proud of the fair trade change that we've done recently. So we're certified by Fairtrade America and uh we started aiming for Almost entirely fair trade and almost entirely organic coffee in around 2021.

And it takes a while because you contract coffee forward But we finally switched our decaf to an organic fair trade decaf, I think, last year, which was uh the last of our major products. that hadn't been fair trade organic. And it does feel really good. You get a fair trade impact report every year. And there are a lot of parts of that program. Um, but there's a fair trade minimum price that you pay for the coffee itself, but you also pay a fair trade premium and the fair trade premium is used for project. So no matter what you pay for the coffee, even if you're twice what the fair trade minimum is, no matter what it is, you also pay the premium.

Um, which I think is currently twenty cents a pound for green coffee. It's gonna go up to probably twenty five cents next year. And we did about uh a fifty thousand dollars in fair trade premiums last year and that's all money that goes to things like solar programs or building schools or important important projects as decided by the people who own the cooperative. And Fair Trade America works f with with Fair Trade International. And Fair Trade International only certifies co-ops. So every coffee we have that's Fair Trade certified also comes from a cooperative.

So it's a cooperative along the whole supply chain, which is part of the Cooperative principles. It's like 0. 7 or something, 0. 5 cooperation among co-ops on the list of cooperative principles. And it means that we're paying that premium to people who are uh as members of a co-op themselves making the same kinds of decisions we are. What are we gonna do with that money? Are we gonna pay pay it forward as windmills? Are we gonna plant shade trees? Are we gonna get a new certification? Um and that's really a cool thing to be a part of. Yeah. It sounds like it sounds like it would just imbue everyone at the coffee shop with a a really deep sense of purpose beyond customer service, which is obviously sort of the very tip of the spear, it's important.

But if people feel like they're doing something important with their lives and their and their work daily, that just it resonates out to everything that they do. Absolutely. How long have you been with with Gimme Coffee personally? I've been with Gimme since twenty fourteen. Oh, that's a long time, yeah. Yes. And um I'm a really Typical Gimme story in a lot of ways. I started as an admin assistant and I kept getting promoted. And Gimme is a organization that promotes from within where we can. It's actually part of our policy and principle is that every position we post gets posted internally first, and every internal candidate will always get an interview, regardless of whether or not it appears on paper that they meet the requirements for the position.

So even if you don't meet the requirements yet, you'll get an interview, you'll get practice answering the questions and understanding what people want for that role, you know, and uh and sometimes you'll be a good fit without necessarily, oh, you didn't quite work there for four years. you know, but you have some of the experience that we need. Colina Nunu was um the other uh managing director of Gimme who helped lead the transition team. So they came on in in 2020 to run the tr uh help us run the transition. Um they were a co-managing director with me and they had a similar story where they started as a barista in I think 2002.

Uh yes. And did a lot of things in the in between, bought coffee, roasted coffee, went and got a master's degree, worked at other organizations and and came back. Yeah. So I'm going to guess that you have a lot lower turnover than your average coffee shop. We try. It's it's very difficult and we are working on this and trying to figure out what works best because It's hard to advertise a breeze deposition in a way that makes someone sort of scrolling down indeed see it as something that could be a long-term job. And it's hard to convey this is full time.

You will have a regular schedule your schedule will be s Sunday through Wednesday. Every week you can plan your art shows around it. Y you can have a 401k, you can join the board. And we we still do get people who will say, well I'm home for the summer from school Can I get a barista job? And three months is how long it takes our training process to complete. Uh home from for the summer is not really a good fit. For us for a barista position. But anyway, yes, we do have somewhat lower turnover than other organizations and other food service businesses.

And we generally don't have difficulty hiring, even when other food service businesses are having trouble with that Um, in part because of benefits. But yeah, we're uh it's one of the the ongoing operating plan projects is how do we convey to people that if you want to be a barista for twenty years, you can be a barista for twenty years. So you're So you're kind of battling the general conception of what a coffee shop barista is. Right. And and this is definitely not what what's happening at Gimme Coffee, like in any sense at all. And so you have to have a lot of communication, a lot, a lot of information kind of right at the get-go, which isn't necessarily available right at the bat.

You've been there for like a uh Since twenty fourteen, you said. And what have you learned from personally, like from the process of this, you know, working at a regular coffee shop? I I assume it was it was more in line with the zeitgeist back in twenty fourteen than it is now. And then the the transition, how does that affect you personally? Yeah, I I think the gimme's always been slightly unusual as a coffee shop in that it's always hired from within uh where it can, which means that, you know, we tend to have people who have experience at a front line of some kind, whether they're answering the phone or working directly with customers who are now buying coffee or delivering coffee or any of those kinds of jobs.

So when I started at Gimme, I drank coffee but I was not very expert in coffee. And so I learned a lot from the coffee department here. And there's sort of an education team and regular educational events that you can go to and learn. Like how do you taste coffee? Oh, they turned you into a coffee snob? Well, I actually I'm I'm not very much of a coffee stab. Um Chris Lau is our current director of coffee and he has a terrific palette. So I'm sitting here and I'm like, it's citrusy. And Chris is saying, that's kaffir lime. You know? So uh Uh there's a and there's also a bunch of ways that you grade coffee on scales that he's an expert in as well.

So I I learned um I learned enough about coffee to have the conversation definitely and to enjoy it and have a sense of what what the the different things are around the world, but I'm definitely not at the caffeine lime level as a taster. Um and and I would also say that one of the things I like about Gimme is that one of our our sort of internal policies is that we like good coffee, but we're not gonna be jerks about it. However you like to drink your coffee is how you like to drink your coffee. And so, you know, we're we're gonna have a conversation where we'll talk to people where with whatever they prefer, whether they want like the best cup of diner coffee they've ever had.

We'll try to make that happen with a brewing method. But anyway, trying trying hard not to turn people into coffee stops. Okay And and I also learned a lot about logistics and those kinds of practices. I actually, my educational work was in archaeology. I worked in food systems, but like 10,000 years ago, food systems. not a lot of less than truckload transport. And I so I learned a lot from Gimme about all of the like coffee market. How do you contract forward, how does coffee get from A to B and what are all the steps it goes through in the the middle, which was all really educational and and like gives you an incredible view into how interconnected the whole global market is on all of the pieces that go together into and contribute to both coffee prices and whether we can get the coffee and where it will go and what it will cost and what it will taste like Um right.

It was really, really interesting. And then when we converted to a co-op, I talked with Kevin about it when he started having having ideas about converting the company to a co-op. And at the time, my only model for a workaround co-op was really small. So things like Arizmendi Cooperative in the Bay Area where every bakery has a small number of people and they tend to work most of the same role roles and make decisions really collaboratively. And so when when I first thought work around co op I was like, but how do you make decisions if there are 50 of you?

Like we obviously can't do that thing where we all get together in the morning and talk about it. And so I learned a lot from the transition and from our cooperative developers about how you can make decision making work in a way that invites everyone to give that kind of feedback while still enabling you to be able to change your flour supplier. in a in a quick way. And we worked with Mackenzie Jones, who runs the worker place locally, who's a cooperative developer who came and sat in uh in our first board meetings when we were all trying to understand what a board did and you know how Rogers rules work and all of all of the parts of of organization who helped us think through a lot of that. decision making in practice.

We'd talked about it on the transition team. We tried to model it as we were transitioning. But then as soon as you're doing it in practice, you're having to answer all those questions again, you know, but how does it actually work? So how how does it actually work? Walk us through uh just a strategy meeting, I guess, or how how do those decisions actually get made? So at Gimme, operational decisions live with management. So that's me and everyone who reports to me. So an operational decision would be something like When do we open in the morning?

How many shifts are there on any given day? Where do we get flour for the bakery Do we want to change our our coffee ordering practices? Those are all things that are operational decisions. They might be projects if they're changes at they might be on our operating plan, in which case we'd ask the board for feedback But the decision lives with operations. And that's basically to allow you to be able to do things like New York State added prenatal care as a kind of PTO and we need to be able to implement it right away. The board is in charge of governance and governance includes the bigger strategy questions, the approval of the budget and what we're spending the budget on. um and uh mission vision values and things.

So the board is consulted on all of our operating plan, like if we were to open a new location w the board would vote on it and the membership would be consulted. But also there can be a sort of a a funny line in it where Currently the board runs our rally donation program and decides where to donate the money, which is sort of a governance decision, and then all of the things about how much money per bag of coffee or what the percentage is or when do we donate it is an operational decision. And you can sort of see similar things as well in terms of scheduling where it's operational to say we're gonna move to open at seven AM at our MLK Street location, but it's maybe governance to say we have a principle about predictable scheduling and here's how we can do predictable scheduling and what our values are around predictable scheduling.

So the board might have Values questions about days off, or you know, how we align with our living wage certification, which is living wage for us And things like that. So that's part of why m having Mackenzie there was really helpful because trying to figure out where the lines are in those decisions, you're having to think about every decision you make in a new way. In order to think about where does it fit, who decides and and who makes the the final call. Is there anything that you know now about working in this cooperative structure that you couldn't have learned, you know, that nobody could have told you about, that you only you only learned it just because you had to live it?

I think there are a couple things about our transition that I definitely would have done differently, having now transitioned, that nobody could really give us feedback on. early on. And a couple of those things are that if I if I had known earlier um how complex bylaws were, we would have involved the lawyer much earlier. We work with a a cooperative lawyer who's an expert in cooperative law. And so there were things that our transition team said, we really want to do this. And then he said, you can't do that. That's not allowed in cooperative law.

And for some of those things we had already said to all employees at one of those meetings, here's what we want to do. So if we were doing it again, I definitely would have involved the lawyer earlier in that process. But it also taught us to have those conversations in a way that's much more transparent about what we know Um, and that's really what the process has taught us is how to have a conversation where we say there's a new law, there's a new requirement, there's a plan that we have, here's what we know for sure. Here's what we think is true and that we're going to be pursuing.

Here's what we're researching and investigating. And to have those conversations in a way that's much more transparent about that decision making process. And that's also common helpful, I think, in our union negotiations in those conversations where it makes it much easier if you can say this is statutory, we're required to do this. This is because of our food safety practice, you know, and this is something where we can have a conversation. that fits within the system. Or sometimes I don't know if that's allowed and I will go find out. So I did not know that you are also your employees are also unionized?

Yeah, our baristas are unionized. Uh the union co-op model is a lot more common in Europe than it is in the United States. We have, I think, one of the larger union co-ops in the United States. So our baristas are unionized and then last year our production and roasting staff voted to join the barista union. So that does that add another layer of complexity to the uh to the member can anybody join the union, the member owners and the non-member owners? Yeah, you just have to be very clear about what is a member benefit and what is a um worker benefit so that you're it doesn't come across like you're trying to offer someone in the union a special deal.

So it involves clarity and trying to balance out we're talking about decision making and um our decision matrix has a a h a whole section for here are decisions we negotiate with the union, here are decisions we can make as governance, you know, how does that conversation were this sounds like it could potentially be it sounds wonderful for the for the employees and for the for everybody but it also sounds kind of complicated. So I'm wondering if there's uh you know, is it because Gimme is a little bit bigger with fifty five employees, that's a like you said, it's a fairly large ish size for a town like Ithaca.

Um is there a size below which that might not be so useful, do you think? Like if it were much smaller if you had only maybe five employees or ten employees. I believe in New York State you are not allowed to have a cooperative with fewer than six member owners. I could be wrong about the number. So there's a when we let me take a step back. When we talked to the folks we talked to in our cooperative transition, we talked to a bunch of experts at different organizations about cooperatives. And they gave us case studies and models that were like, here's how cooperatives can work at different sizes and scales, and here's how how cooperatives can work with different levels of of complexity.

And some cooperatives that are smaller can really do the kind of consensus based decision making, especially if everyone's in the same place all the time. Um, and you don't have multiple locations. And and some cooperatives want more vertical structure or hierarchical structure than that. So there's all different ways you can set it up Um, and ours is is somewhat complex just because of the two, the union and the co-op trying to work together. But you can have a small union co-op, I think oh, I forget who they are, but there's a union co-op in I think Rhode Island that's ten people.

So I think two people are not eligible to be in the in the union because they're managers and then everyone else is in the union because they're not managers. And and then almost everyone is in the co-op. So it is a structure that can work at all different sizes. So what So I want to ask you just a couple more questions because I know we've been talking, I could just kind of go on. This is so fascinating and I just I just love it. What do you wish people would ask you more? What question do you wish you got more frequently? Oh gosh. I think I think one of the questions that I wish we got more frequently is about what are we able to do for the community and for each other.

We get a lot of questions about why does a latte cost that? What's what's the best coffee and we're happy to answer those questions. But we'd really love to be able to have conversations consistently with people that that are about what can we do with for the community, what can we do with each other, and what can we do for employees here and why that's a principle Right. And what is your what is one of the main confusion what what is something that people are often confused about as far as gimme coffee structure and place in the community goes.

I think a lot of people think that Gimme is a really big business. Um we s see people occasionally say so Right. We see people occasionally say something like, Ogimme's a big corporation and we're we're a cooperative corporation, which is what the term is in New York State. And We're not a very big business and we have a pretty short hierarchical tree. You know, there's no vice president of whatever working remotely from Denmark. And and so I think That's one of the conversations that we're we try to have and try to get that information out that like we're a we're a regular size business.

Small town coffee roaster with a couple of cafes. Exactly. Is there what are you excited about for Gimme's future? Is there a version that you that you're working towards something that our listeners might not have heard about yet? Well, we're very excited this summer to be moving from our tiny little kiosk on Cornell's campus to a much larger space on Cornell's campus in the building next door, which we're thrilled about and The employees there are also thrilled by because it's it's a real tight fit to be making espresso in that tiny footprint.

And in the the longer term, we're looking at some new product development Which is something the board has to approve in terms of governance versus operations. So we're we're looking to add canned cold brew and we're trying a lot of canned cold brew to see what's good and drinkable, which is a fun project at the moment. And we're also trying out some specialty instant coffee. So high quality, same flavor profile as our current coffee, but you can take it camping and just pour it in water. So that's pretty fun. Will these be available in local stores or That's the hope, yeah.

We're just at the tasting stages right now, so we've been really excited to to taste a bunch of it. But It's uh it's a sort of fun single serve market where it's definitely happened to me. I go through the the airport and I'm like, all of this coffee's terrible. If I had a little pack, it would make my life a lot easier. And uh and we're also looking to purchase our some of our property in the future, which currently we rent everywhere and we're looking to build some equity. So that's another thing that We're working on for a roastery which is between Ithaca and Trumansberg and it's still owned by the previous owner of Gimme And we're um looking to buy from him, which will really set us up for a more stable future where we can be building that kind of equity, which is um a really good goal at this time.

Great. Fantastic. Well thank you so much, Claire. I this has just been a fantastically interesting conversation. I really appreciate your time and all of your insights for this and for anybody listening Now you know when you go get your coffee at Gimme, you are doing so much with that dollar, that latte that you're that you're drinking. It's not just it's very local, but it's also you're affecting, you know, fair trade across the globe and people in Buffalo. I I d uh this is a there's just so many levels to this that this very small business is doing good at.

And It's something that that is really accessible for many businesses, I think. So if you're anybody is interested in learning more about it. Look into co-ops. Absolutely. And cooperation among co-ops is one of the principles of co-ops, which means that please do reach out to our board or to our main phone line if you're interested in becoming a co-op. We'll tell you how we did it and who we talked to And the grants we got so that you can do the same thing if you want to. The Ithaca Local Economy Lab is produced by Practically Real Enterprises LLC and brought to life by an amazing team, including technical advisor Jake Gribschaw, Associate Producer Stacey Cornelius content strategist Sonia Simone, and Creative Advisor Erin O'Shaughnessy.

Yen Ospina is our artist, and the music is by Carsie Blanton. Until next time, take good care