S01:E04
Unicorn is a wholefood supermarket in Manchester, UK, owned by the roughly 50 people who work there. Every member is a director, and every member is paid the same hourly wage, whatever job they do. Two-thirds of what it sells is organic, including all the fresh fruit and veg, and it chalks its own prices up on the shop wall next to Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons’ and Asda’s so customers can check the gap for themselves. Thirty years on, it’s still trading.
My guests are Debbie and Kellie, two of Unicorn’s worker-owners.
We get into how they hold those prices where they are; the money the shop gives away each year, worked out from its wage bill rather than its profit and taken out of takings before profit is counted; a no-strings grants fund for the UK farms they buy from; the farmland they bought and the farming that didn’t work; why they have never opened a second shop and published a free guide instead; and why “owner” turned out to be the wrong word for what they are.
Show notes, links and the full archive: https://content.changingthenarrative.media/making-locally-grown-organic-food-more-accessible
Unicorn Grocery - https://www.unicorn-grocery.coop/
Grow a Grocery, Unicorn’s free guide to starting a wholefood co-operative - https://www.unicorn-grocery.coop/about-us/grow-your-own-grocery/
The Kindling Trust and Kindling Farm - https://kindling.org.uk/
How (Not) To Do Business is from Changing the Narrative - a show about companies breaking convention on how they’re structured and run, and how they engage with their communities. It’s member-funded and ad-free. New episodes every second Tuesday.
Chapters
00:00 The 1% and 4% funds
00:39 How Not to Do Business
00:59 A whole food supermarket that competes on price
02:15 Meet Debbie and Kellie
03:35 The Solidarity Fund
04:46 How they both ended up at Unicorn
07:21 What a co-op gives you that a normal job doesn’t
09:48 From weekly meetings to sociocracy
14:02 What Unicorn actually is
16:22 Flat pay, no hierarchy, low overheads
20:43 Growers, climate and the Growers Fund
25:26 How this differs from a supermarket
27:43 Is organic really more expensive?
28:41 Price boards and word of mouth
30:31 Why there’s only one Unicorn
36:29 Growth to what end?
38:07 Stewards, not owners
40:25 Why the language changed — and shrinking back from 75 members
42:48 Recruiting for a co-op
47:19 Raising money from customers: loan stock
52:20 The farm: what worked and what didn’t
58:37 Is the UK hostile to worker co-ops?
1:02:47 What happened after the co-op heyday
1:04:12 The one thing to take away
1:06:49 Close