Our VIP paid membership program* is one of the most popular features of being a participant in the Food and Meat Co-op and it is for stellar reasons that this program is so popular!
1. It's super affordable
2. It saves you a ton of money! Considering that that membership saves you 5% on your purchases for the entire year, many VIP members make up their membership fee in the savings alone within the first 2 orders.
3. Early ordering is probably the #1 factor! Since we sell out of a lot of the limited edition or "that month only" products and even our monthly staples, VIP's get first dibs for the first 24 hours. This alone is a priceless value.
4. VIP Express lanes at pickup.
5. Your buying habits, reviews, requests and suggestions are the ones we use more than any other factor in determining what products to source and offer. So you have a huge influence on the direction we go with this co-op!
Click the link above to join for $34 a year for life before Aug. 1
And as we have shared, we use the membership funds to help fund immediate financial needs, needs primarily associated with the pickups such as truck expenses, fuel and truck drivers. Of course there are several other operating expenses (like a website) but the majority of our expenses are in the physical transport of the products to each pickup location.
When we named the price of $34 a year originally, this was already a super-low priced annual membership fee. Our goal was to keep the fee as low as possible, while helping to cover some of our transport costs.
Dozens of people have mentioned that this is so cheap to be a member that we could easily charge $99 or more a year and it still be way too cheap. We understand the value, but we also are very conservative spenders and get really creative with how to operate to keep costs low, making a lot of personal sacrifices along the way.
However, 2021 has shown that are super low fee is just not cutting it. The costs of fuel have nearly doubled. Not to mention, this fuel impact hits us on many levels (not just our direct route to our pickup locations, but from our suppliers that are passing the cost for them to get from their farms and facilities to us originally).
A second factor has been the company that we use to rent trucks and hire drivers for the day. Their labor expenses have increased significantly over the past few months. As such, this month, they have finally said that as much as they don't want to, they need to increase this cost to us.
We went to the drawing board and we could easily double the annual fee, but it's important to use to make food as accessible as possible, so we are only increasing by $5 per year for this first increase to see if it covers what we need. This is only a $0.42 increase per month.
Yes, still incredibly affordable!
But, we didn't want to just increase overnight without giving you all an option to secure our original fee first.
So, our fee will not increase until August 1. That means, anyone that becomes a VIP before August 1 will only pay $34 per year for LIFE! We reward loyalty as that is what makes this co-op tick! So as a way to say "THANK YOU" for being loyal, secure that membership fee for life. You have the option to auto-renew and it will autorenew at $34 a year to the day for the life of your membership.
You do have the option to cancel to avoid autorenew, but if it lapses, then it is the current annual rate available.
Anyway, we LOVE what we do and we LOVE making fresh food and meat as affordable and accessible as possible with our unique co-op model. It is such a fulfilling passion project to help our farmers, suppliers and producers stay in business and get paid what they are worth for their food while saving families all over 30-50% off retail prices.
It's a beautiful picture of a community coming together to accomplish a massive project!
*We want to point out, it is FREE to participate in our co-op. You are NOT required to have a VIP membership to participate. It is important to us that food is accessible to everyone! But in order to keep our prices lower for the entire community, we do have expenses that cannot be avoided. As such, we created the VIP program with extra benefits to help with these expenses and pass the benefits onto those members that are willing to help cover them.