Central Grocers Executive Summary

The internship I embarked on this past semester was at my place of employment, Central Grocers, Inc., located in Joliet, Illinois. Central Grocers is structured as a retail cooperative, owned by the independent supermarket retailers that Central Grocers supplies. It is the seventh largest grocery cooperative in America and supplies over 20,000 products to more than 500 independent supermarket stores in the Midwest, meaning they have the second largest market share in the Chicago area market. In terms of the company’s performance, it made 1,944 and 1,483 million dollars in sales in consolidated and wholesale operations, respectively, in its 2015 fiscal year. This is a decrease from the 1,966 and 1,500 million dollars it made in 2014. This decline …show more content…
The six stores ahead of Central Grocers are Topco Associates, Wakefern Food Corp., Associated Wholesale Grocers, Unified Grocers, Associated Wholesalers Inc., and Associated Food Stores. To be a cooperative, the company must be owned and controlled democratically by their members (the people who use the cooperative’s services or buy its goods, not by outside investors), where cooperative members elect their board of directors from within the membership. It must be united willingly to meet their economic goals for their mutual benefit and all of the profits of the cooperative are restored annually to its members in proportion to their purchases. There are approximately thirty grocery retail cooperatives in the United States and several of them, including Central Grocers, belong to the Retailer Owned Food Distributors and Associates (ROFDA), an organization of wholesale food distributors owned by their U.S. independent retail grocer members. A number of the same cooperatives, like Central Grocers, also belong to the National Grocers Association (NGA), which represents the wholesale and retail grocers that incorporates the independent sector of the food distribution