Practice Partner:
Vokomokum Food Coop & Taste Before you Waste

Vokomokum is an autonomous food consumer cooperative in Amsterdam. Members work collectively to have access to high quality, fairly priced and local products from transparent sources. All products are organic and vegetarian.

There are 150-200 members, a member can be a person, a family or a collective. There is now more space for new members because some left the Netherlands during lockdown and because the coop organized timeslots for food-order pick-ups during COVID. By keeping this system in place, the coop can accommodate more members.

Every member does a 2-3 hour shift every 2 months to contribute to the overall functioning of the food coop. By ordering together in bigger quantities the members get prices 20-30% lower than the supermarkets. There is now more space for new members because many members left Amsterdam during the lockdown and they learnt to organize timeslots for food order pick-ups.

Vokomokum is achieving food justice because they are supplying directly from local small-scale farmers for fair prices. Some of the members are farmers themselves. They are also being inclusive by allowing the members to choose the work that they can contribute. A ramp was made for a member with disabilities and people who are unwell, e.g. chronic fatigue or burnout do not have to work and home delivery is sometimes organized. The food pick-up usually happens once a month with a communal meal for socializing and community building. Some members have gone on to form new food cooperatives in other parts of Amsterdam, and there are now 5 in the city.

One of the challenges for the Vokomokum is to be more inclusive and to diversify their membership. They want to have a more ethnically diverse membership that reflects the cultural diversity of the city, currently most members are white. Many of the members come from housing collectives where they share the work to make it easy to do the shifts and pick-up the food. The food cooperative also requires you to be organized and think in weeks and months of food planning instead of what food to get for the next day.rm sustainable investments such as planting trees or developing a multi-year training programme for future CSA farmers.

What changes does Vokomokum need to happen for more social justice and inclusion?

We want to include more local suppliers who need support for reasons such as not having access to organic markets or restaurants

We have done our outreach by word of mouth so to go beyond our social bubbles we need to organise more communication as we did at the star

We need to stay as a small community-based cooperative and for there to be more of them across the city

What do we at Vokomokum need to learn for more social justice and inclusion to happen?

We need to learn to explain the concept and benefits of a food cooperative more clearly to a multicultural Dutch society. In the Netherlands cooperatives are not common amongst food consumers. For many their first reference of a cooperative is Rabobank!

We need to find and support local farmers who are not so well supported and would benefit from Vokomokum as a customer.

This video was also created for the project Taste Before you Waste which takes place in the same building as the Vokomokum

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