Daily Bread Co-operative is an English Christian workers' co-operative specialising in packing and selling wholefoods. It was the first workers' co-operative to register under what is now known as the 'white rules', and is listed as Co-op number 1 under the Industrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM), which now forms part of Co-operatives UK. One of the founder members, Roger Sawtell, was the first chair of ICOM.
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History
Daily Bread started life in the Northampton parish of St. Peter's, Weston Favell. A group of nine friends - four married couples and a bachelor - formed the idea of taking their Christian beliefs and values into the business environment. Since Daily Bread was founded on the basis of Christian beliefs, the name chosen comes from a line in the Lord's Prayer.
Another founder member was Michael Jones, who owned a family firm of jewellers in Northampton. He had been involved in the Co-operative model of doing business, and to that end he converted his enterprise into a workers' co-operative.
Daily Bread Co-operative (DBC) was registered as a limited company in March 1976, the first business of its kind to adopt a new set of Model Rules for Common Ownership. It was a further four years before trading started, on October the 1st 1980, in what was once the laundry of St. Andrew's Hospital, reputedly the largest privately owned psychiatric hospital in the country.
The members of the co-operative were faced with challenges, including how to generate wealth without compromising the beliefs to which they adhered, how to provide work for those who might not be able to find it elsewhere (which was a stated secondary goal of the company), and how to balance individual freedom and creativity with the collective responsibility to care for the business, each other and the community.
Social aims
The co-operative has a range of social aims on top of the basic task of providing healthy food to the local and wider community at a fair price. The social aims include:
The workforce stands at around 25, including members and non-members, full- and part-time, and the annual turnover stands at around £1.3 million.
Daily Bread as a workers' co-operative, in common with other co-operatives, runs the business on the democratic principle of 'one person, one vote', meaning that all the members have an equal say in how the business should be run, as contrasted to the standard business model where a company is owned by individuals or by a group of shareholders. Daily Bread is different in other ways, such as a wage structure where each worker is paid equally regardless of length of tenure or seeming superiority, with only a slight increase for members over non-members in recognition of extra duties and responsibilities, and possible extra allowances for workers with dependents.
Product range
Daily Bread's product range of wholefoods has increased from about twelve lines in the first few months to over 5,500 different products, and as well as wholefoods the co-operative stocks environmentally friendly cleaning materials, ethical body care products, and energy saving gadgets No products that contain any ingredient derived from an animal are stocked. As well as vegetarians and vegans Daily Bread also caters to those with other special dietary requirements, including wheat or gluten intolerance and diabetes. While no bread is baked on the premises, Daily Bread does carry a range of their own, cooked-on-site cereals and snacks.
Daily Bread Cambridge
Daily Bread has served as a model for other Co-operatives and wholefood sellers, including the Unicorn Grocery. Daily Bread Cambridge opened in 1992 with a staff of five: one ex-member from Northampton and four other full-time members. Its structure is similar to Daily Bread Northampton, and the Cambridge enterprise was given permission to trade under the original name and to use the co-operative's logo.