'Co-op reopens' Media Release
From ANU Food Co-op Wiki
7th September 2007
One of Canberra’s best-kept secrets has just moved a little further out into the open.
In its 31st year, the Co-operative Food Shop has a new home on the corner of Barry Drive and Kingsley Streets.
To celebrate, everyone is invited to a party this Sunday September 9th from 2pm until 5.30pm.
Just metres from the pre-war building in Kingsley Street on the edge of the ANU in City West, which the Co-operative Food Shop had occupied for nearly 24 years, the temporary building will also house the Canberra Dance Theatre and the Art Therapy and Creative Arts Therapy Studio, who will also showcase their wares to the public at the housewarming party.
The Co-operative Food Shop will provide free organic coffee and juices, and wholefood cakes and snacks, accompanied by live music, thanks in part to a donation from ANU Exchange.
Organic food shoppers can breathe easy -- the new shop’s use of all-natural paints and floorcoverings has been made possible by the provision at cost of Biopaint from Colours By Nature and Marmoleum from Nu-Lay Flooring.
The pleasant shopping environment will be further enhanced with the addition of Wrigley Southern Reflectors and of translucent window shades (including for the skylights already installed) allowing excellent use of natural warmth and light.
Once solar electricity has been added, the building will be something of a demonstration unit for environmentally sustainable technologies.
The Co-operative Food Shop has always been a working example of a sustainable way for a community to feed itself. Starting life in 1976 on the ground floor of the ANU Students Union, the not-for-profit combined alternatives to conventional diet, to conventional commercial practices and to conventional disregard for environmental consequences.
This combination of alternatives hit all the right buttons, not just for ANU students and staff, but for the wider Canberra community, who happily paid a bit extra to be non-member shoppers.
Within three years the Co-op grew to be the largest retail purveyor of health foods in the southern hemisphere, and it did that without the organic fresh fruit and vegetable section which accounts for most of its current turnover.
Not surprisingly it outgrew a series of premises, moving to a wing of what is now the Drill Hall Gallery in 1978 and then across Kingsley Street in 1983 to the ROCKS area.
That old building is already being demolished to make way for new student accommodation. To be built to a high Greenstar rating by Baulderstone Hornibrook, this high-rise residential block may well be home to new Co-op members keen to keep down their food bills by volunteering a few hours of labour a year, and to keep down their impact on a fragile environment by buying minimally-processed food, often grown without anything artificial, and supplied in bulk to shoppers who bring their own containers (if not their own produce).
The Co-operative Food Shop’s contribution to minimising that impact was recognised earlier this year with two No Waste awards.
The temporary building honours commitments made by all three ANU Exchange partners: the ACT Government’s commitment to community groups, the ANU’s commitment to a university icon, and Baulderstone Hornibrook’s commitment to corporate and environmental responsibility. It will house the three groups for between two and five years while permanent accommodation is built for them elsewhere in ANU Exchange.
