Villages are mobilizing and consumers are coming together to create participatory grocery stores.
Photo d’illustration (Photo Archives Anthony Maurin).
Move your CoQ! is at the initiative of this great idea. Managed by consumer associations, grocery stores operate collaboratively, with each member devoting two hours per month to their management.
Move your CoQ! is a non-profit association which energizes rural areas by bringing together local stakeholders and encouraging citizen engagement. She wants to facilitate the creation of health and commerce services in rural areas. This model makes it possible to offer products at cost price, negotiated directly with local producers.
Move your CoQ! supports participatory grocery store projects to recreate local services in villages, promote the local economy and local producers, and revitalize communities by recreating social ties. To date, 200 grocery stores have been supported, 130 of which are already in operation. The others will open before March 2025. By strengthening links between consumers and farmers, these grocery stores guarantee fair remuneration for producers while offering quality products at affordable prices.
Illustrative photo. (photo ABoris Boutet)
Participatory grocery stores thus respond to an essential challenge in rural areas: offering healthy and affordable food that values the work of farmers. Furthermore, located in small villages where they are often the only business, they also make it possible to recreate a local service and avoid having to take the car to do your shopping.
Unlike AMAPs and the joint purchasing group, these grocery stores are real businesses, which resemble traditional grocery stores, with departments, a cash register, etc. Beyond their function as points of sale, these grocery stores are quickly becoming places of life and exchanges. They strengthen social cohesion and energize village life. They also show the capacity of rural communities to innovate and come together to improve their daily lives.
Photo d’illustration. (Photo : Archives S.Ma/ObjectifGard)
These grocery stores, managed by consumers who each give two hours of their time per month, and located in premises provided free of charge, pay almost no charges. The products sold in these grocery stores can therefore be sold without margin, 100% of the price then goes to the producer, members therefore benefit from products at affordable prices.
The supply of local products in grocery stores is supplemented by orders from wholesalers and purchasing centers who sell at wholesale prices everything that is not produced locally, notably hygiene products. Which makes these grocery stores places where you can stock up on groceries for the week significantly cheaper for the same product than in supermarkets.
In Occitanie, 24 grocery stores were supported by Bouge ton CoQ! and in the Gard it is in Aumessas that it happens.
Illustrative photo. Photo Archives Tony Duret / Objectif Gard
How to revive a sleeping village with a grocery store? Move your CoQ! says it. “ We help them mobilize a collective, in particular by hosting a public meeting in the village. We support the collective formed in the creation of the grocery store and subsidize the renovation of the premises to the tune of 500 euros, and finance two years of the management software. Finally, onceWhen the grocery store is open, we ensure regular monitoring and put you in touch with the 200 grocery stores in the network. »
More information by email at epiceries(a)bougetoncoq.fr or by telephone at 09 80 80 12 67.
