Natural Food Retailers Association

By Corinne Shindelar, CEO

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The 2010 annual general membership meeting provided a great accumulation of all that INFRA has become over its few short years.  It was a wonderful evening of members enjoying a meal together, hearing from board chair Alex Beamer and awards presentations. Overall it could be said that we had fun and got to know each other a little bit better.

 There is never enough time to say all I would like to at this meeting. The past year saw many tough situations and decisions both personally and professionally. INFRA lost some members and gained six times the number that we lost. We were profitable and issued dividend checks for the first time on the 2009 profits. We launched CoopMetrics, increased the number of share groups, saw growth in the SPC program and members involvement, increased our staffing resources and enjoyed great board leadership.

Moving forward, it becomes evident that we need to address the question of how INFRA can grow in the right way. Our relevancy as an association requires balancing the pragmatic side of what we do with our altruistic actions. INFRA programs need to be pragmatic and flexible to meet the diverse needs of our members. We need our programs, such as the SPC program to support our altruistic work.

 We need the SPC program to be successful and have strong member and industry participation. Making some sacrifices to align this work directly impacts our voice as a group of retailers for the serious altruistic work that we need to do to protect the integrity of our industry. Because of the SPC program, which has made us the third account in the industry, INFRA has the attention of manufacturers. When we told the owners of certain manufacturer companies to meet with us at Expo West regarding GMOs they attended and they listened. When we told them that it was extremely important to us that they verify their products as non-GMO, that our consumers expected us to protect the integrity of the food on our shelves and that just making a “no GMO” claim or being certified organic was no longer enough, they listened. When we told them that we were launching October as non-GMO month in alignment with retailers all across the country regardless of affiliation, and that we would highly promote products that were verified by the Non-GMO project, they REALLY listened.

 They listened because we are doing what we have to through programs like the SPC program. The activities we do need to make sense for our members and be manageable by the association. Our activities need to keep building our community. We want all of our members to see INFRA as an extension of their own staff, and to move forward with programs in 2010 like developing the training materials and supplement program. We need to grow the CoopMetrics program so that we can work together to better understand our opportunities, and we need to put resources and energy into our work with the Non-GMO Project. We need the pragmatic activities that we are all committed to as a group so that we have the resources and foundation for our altruistic work.

 In August of this year INFRA will officially be five years old. I still struggle everyday with this question of balance. I see where other associations have grown to a point where being able to respond to grassroots member efforts (like Jimbo’s 10-10-10 day push a week before expo) is difficult or requires a level of posturing and politics that can challenge ones values. I see INFRA getting industry recognition. I see a maturing industry with all stakeholders being challenged by this question of balance. I see many things that our diverse group of members wants us  to do both pragmatically and altruistically. Yet at the same time INFRA needs to do this in a way that recognizes not everything is going to fit every member.

At the end of the day while we work to sort through where we can align and what is meaningfully different about each member one thing is for sure, everyone who is a member of INFRA is balancing this question of how to grow correctly, working to ensure success with pragmatic business decisions that continue the altruistic work necessary to protect the integrity of our food system, the core that makes up our industry.