Rainbow Grocery Cooperative
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| Worker cooperative | |
| Industry | Grocery store, health food store |
| Founded | 1975 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
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Area served
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San Francisco/Bay Area |
| Products | Natural organic vegetarian food, household supplies, bath & body, supplements, and herbs |
| Members | 200+ |
| Website | rainbow.coop |
Rainbow Grocery Cooperative is a worker-owned and run food cooperative located in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1975, Rainbow Grocery is a member of NoBAWC and the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives.
Although it quickly became a secular project, Rainbow Grocery was started as a bulk food-buying program by an ashram that existed in San Francisco in the early 1970s. The buying program was coordinated by an ashram member who also worked for the People’s Common Operating Warehouse of San Francisco, a political project using food distribution as a form of community organizing and political education. The People’s Warehouse was striving to build a “People’s Food System,” including a network of small community food stores throughout San Francisco. Rainbow Grocery opened a storefront in the summer of 1975 on 16th Street in the Mission District of San Francisco. At this time, the People’s Food System already had two stores in San Francisco: Seeds of Life, in the lower Mission District, and Noe Valley Community Store. The ashram members who organized the opening of Rainbow Grocery did so largely by studying and copying the operations of the Noe Valley store. Rainbow Grocery opened with exclusively volunteer labor. After the first few months, there was enough income to pay the project’s two most active workers. As the store became increasingly successful, it was able to bring more workers on as paid staff, although people were generally not brought on to payroll until after several months of consistent volunteering. As the staff at Rainbow grew larger, the need for more defined organizational relationships also increased.
For the purpose of simplicity, Rainbow was started under the legal ownership of two of its founders. Though the store operated collectively, this meant that these two people were responsible for reporting Rainbow’s operations on their tax forms and were responsible for any debts or lawsuits. In 1976, ownership was transferred to a nonprofit corporation. When incorporating, Rainbow simply adapted the corporate documents of the People’s Warehouse, which included the Warehouse’s statement of six political principles underlying the People's Food System. Including the six principles was done, in part, as an attempt to appease people at the Warehouse’s who thought Rainbow was not political enough. Adapting the Warehouse’s incorporation documents also simplified the legal work of incorporating. Unfortunately, the Warehouse’s legal model was not very appropriate or functional. The Warehouse had written up their incorporation documents with the hopes of obtaining tax-exempt charitable status, which they were unable to do. While Rainbow’s workers already knew Rainbow Grocery would not qualify as a tax-exempt charity, they still incorporated using the nonprofit model of the Warehouse.
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