Editor's note: This article has been corrected to reflect that co-op organizers want to seek backers buying in for $100-$200 each.

BROOKINGS – Three Brookings area women are looking at the possibility of creating a Brookings Area Natural Foods Co-op grocery store. 

To that end, Louise Snodgrass, Shelly Bradenburger and Kirsten Gjesdal are holding a discussion to create such a store. It will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday at the Brookings Public Library. The general public is invited, and snacks prepared with local foods will be provided.

Snodgrass, 24, a spokesperson for the trio, has been a Brookings resident since 2008 and a graduate of Brookings High School. She has worked at Cottonwood Coffee since 2015.

She has a passion for community service work and community development that was a fallout from Hurricane Harvey, when she did disaster liaison work with nonprofit groups in Texas in 2017, “making sure that help was getting where help needed to go.”

“Down there I learned how much I love community development,” Snodgrass said. Good, healthy food is another of her passions. For the past year she has worked for the Brookings Farmers Market and Good Roots Farm and Garden, 3712 Medary Ave.

“I kind of fell into being more intentional with foods, and addressing the food system while trying to build community space,” she explained. “I very much love being part of the Brookings community. I love Brookings.”

For now her passion for healthy food and building community is focused on a natural foods co-op grocery store in Brookings.

“It’s a shared vision,” Snodgrass said of the project the trio of women is looking to move forward. “We came together during a local foods conference in Brookings this year, and we decided that there’s not a lot of local foods access in Brookings, other than the Farmers Market in the summertime, and that’s just for a few hours in the summertime.”

She doesn’t see a lot of options for “local and healthy food in Brookings; and a lot of people drive to Sioux Falls just for local and healthy food options.”

In addition, she sees a sort of “food desert” in Brookings west of Medary Avenue, “because there’s not a grocery store there that has a lot of options.” Downtown Brookings would be the ideal location for the envisioned natural foods co-op.

Getting started: A big challenge

The three women labor under no illusions that bringing their idea to fruition will be cheap or easy.

“It’s a long process,” Snodgrass explained, smiling. “It’s a multi-million dollar process to get a grocery store started.

“We want it to be full-service. We want it to be not just your local foods, but the place where you shop for groceries. Because you wouldn’t just be putting money into a corporation’s pocket.

“The money would stay in the Brookings community. It would be a cooperatively-owned, community-owned grocery store. That means that members of the community buy in as owners: like a co-op.”

At present there is no buy-in, membership fee, corporation or bylaws on the drawing board.

“That’s essentially what this meeting is about,” she explained. “We want to find people in the community who want to form a board of directors to get this off the ground.

“I can’t do it with just two other people. We need a board of six or seven. We need more folks working on this because it is such a big project.”

Snodgrass noted that in cities of all sizes across the country there are about 100 food co-ops such as she described. South Dakota has three full-service grocery store co-ops: in Aberdeen, Rapid City and Sioux Falls.

While the big-dollar figure is more than $1 million, that would be spread out over about five years. For start-up, Snodgrass would like to get about 1,000 backers buying in for $100 to $200 each. 

At the Saturday morning discussion, the three women will welcome input from the public.

Contact John Kubal at jkubal@brookingsregister.com.