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Park Slope Food Coop

Also known as: PSFC, Park Slope Food Co-op

The largest single-store food cooperative in the United States — and quite possibly the world. Founded 1973 by ~10 neighbors including Joe Holtz at Park Slope, Brooklyn; ~17,000 members as of July 2025. Member-owned and operated: each adult member contributes 2 hours 45 minutes of work every six weeks; in exchange, members shop at a 25% wholesale-markup (vs. 26–100% supermarket markup). Owns its building at 782 Union Street since 1980.

What they do

A member-owned [[food-cooperative|food cooperative]] — the largest single-store food coop in the U.S. by membership and volume. Sells groceries, household goods, environmentally-friendly products, and bulk foods at a 25% markup over wholesale. Each adult member must contribute 2 hours 45 minutes of work every six weeks; non-members may not shop. The work-requirement is the operating principle that keeps prices low and member-investment high.

Why it’s listed

Three structural facts:

  1. 52 years of continuous operation in the same model. 1973 → 2026 with the work-requirement intact and the membership structure expanding from 10 founders to ~17,000 members. No comparable U.S. [[food-cooperative|food cooperative]] has scaled this far while keeping the original work-required structure.

  2. Owns its building. Purchased 782 Union Street in 1980. Owning the building means PSFC is not vulnerable to the rent-displacement pressure that has closed most NYC independent grocers, food coops, and cooperative cafes.

  3. The Linewaiters’ Gazette and the institutional culture. PSFC publishes its own member newsletter (the Linewaiters’ Gazette) and maintains a participatory governance structure that has become a teaching case for cooperative-economy organizations nationally. NYU Special Collections preserves the Gazette’s archive — institutional acknowledgment that PSFC is a documented social-movement institution.

Bioregional fit

Anchors the [[new-york-city]] bioregion’s food-cooperative tier. Pairs with [[brooklyn-zen-center]] and [[the-shala-yoga]] in the same borough — three different cooperative-and-lineage institutions holding Brooklyn’s knowledge-care + circulator depth.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

  • Member of: [[business]]
  • Contained by: [[park-slope]] · [[brooklyn]] · [[new-york-city]]

Sources

A listing in the 0mn1.one [[directory]]. Filed under [[new-york-city]] in [[directory|the directory]].

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Practical

shares approach with

  • New York Harbor auto-linked from body mention
  • People's Food Co-op two long-running U.S. food coops — PSFC (1973 Brooklyn) and People's (1970 Portland)
  • Rainbow Grocery Cooperative two long-running U.S. food coops — PSFC member-owned (Brooklyn 1973), Rainbow worker-owned (SF 1975)
  • Wedge Community Co-ops two of the U.S.'s senior community-owned food cooperatives — PSFC (1973 Brooklyn) and Wedge (1974 Minneapolis)

4 inbound links · 4 outbound