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Rainbow Grocery is one of my happy places in San Francisco. The worker-owned cooperative has been in operation for a half-century and is the largest independent natural food store in the city, the largest worker-fronted co-op in California, and a San Francisco Legacy Business. In 2004, Rainbow helped to found the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, which formally ushered the country into the international cooperative community.
The store will host a free 50th Anniversary Block Party from noon to 6pm on Sunday on 14th Street between Folsom and Trainor. There will be high-quality food giveaways aplenty as well as live music from local bands, including our Best of the Bay favorites, The Curtis Family C-Notes.
Rainbow has long been one of my secret weapons for learning about and reporting on new and local food brands. The store has given those crucial first looks to countless mom and pop foodmakers in the Bay Area.
“We make it a priority if you’re local to give you an opportunity to put something on the shelf,” says worker-owner Yesenia Ochoa, who oversees HR and grew up a few blocks away from the store. “I think it’s really wonderful to be able to come into the store and we try to make sure we’ll have little signs that say local so that folks know this is a local person.”
Unlike corporate grocery stores, the money made circulates through other local businesses.
“As worker-owners, we shop and play in the communities we live in,” she adds, ”so you won’t really get that from other stores where the CEO is a million miles away and that money is not trickling down to the community. We are spending our money in the same place that everyone else is.
“When I first started, my whole paycheck was going to Rainbow,” she laughs. “And now, it’s more of like, okay, let me spread it around to my favorite bakery or other places.”
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“The secret of co-ops, I think, is that we actually pay our bills,” says Gordon “Zola” Edgar, worker-owner, co-op president, author, and renowned cheesemonger who recently won the American Cheese Society’s Meritorious Service Award for 2025. “And for a food company that is super important, because you got all these other distributors that do all sorts of things that keep people from getting paid in a timely manner. We obviously buy from a lot of distributors, but if a local person just getting started will go direct, they’ll get paid in 30 days or whatever our terms are for them.
“I had a number of local cheese folks who would call me up and be like, hey, look, I’ve been waiting on a check from distributor X for a while. Can I just bring by like 10 wheels and you can pay a COD? They’d ask because they needed that to make payroll or make their mortgage or whatever it was. And we do that kind of thing just because we know how important they are to our local community, whereas other places don’t necessarily recognize that.”
The next time you’re at Rainbow, whether it’s this weekend or some other day, do take a moment to enjoy the brand new mural created by Afro-Futurist artist and Rainbow’s own Paul Lewin, a joyful work created in the memory of FredI D’Aguilar, who was a 40 year worker-owner and former president of the cooperative. Lewin’s art eloquently expresses how loving a family Rainbow is without words.
Tamara publishes the California Eating and Food Book Club newsletters.
