If we’re going to find radical new ways to help our world, we need people who bring a new level of commitment to the table. We need people who can listen and respond with creativity and a willingness to experiment. Rachel Schneider, a biodynamic gardener, educator, and social entrepreneur from Hawthorne Valley in New York State is one such person. Andrea Valdinocci and Laura Liska spoke with her.
Welcome, Rachel. Let’s talk about your latest project, because you started a rather special social experiment.
Rachel: About 15 minutes from Hawthorne Valley, where I live in upstate New York, is the city of Hudson. Hudson is considered a “food desert” by the USDA. This means that, despite having both extremely wealthy residents and low-income residents, there’s no grocery store in the city. Around 6 years ago, I helped found a small, organic grocery shop in Hudson called Rolling Grocer. Our mission is to provide high-quality, affordable food for everyone—no matter their income level. To do that, we developed a three-tiered pricing system: we calculate three different prices for every item on our shelves, using a “living wage” calculator from MIT that provides income information for every county in the US. Then, people choose which price to pay based on the number of people in their household and their income.
But Rolling Grocer isn’t just a cool entrepreneurial idea that you’re trying out—you didn’t open a store in Hudson because it didn’t have one. You sensed a greater need in the community, and this was your response, right?
There are at least 6000 people living in Hudson. Residents come from the African American community, the Bangladeshi community, the Latino community, the Jamaican community, and the Anglo community. It’s a real melting pot. Just 15 minutes away, and it’s another universe. While I was doing some work with the children who go to public school in Hudson, I discovered some of them had never seen a cow. Here’s my farm full of cows, literally 15 minutes from their door. I felt this wasn’t right. I thought, I’m going to work on bringing them from the town to the farm. So I started a summer camp where children could cook, take care of the animals, see them, be with them, swim in our pond, and just enjoy the gardening. That’s when I first realized that Hudson doesn’t even have a decent grocery store. It is a city that draws so many tourists, artists, restauranteurs, all kinds of folks, many of whom stay to live and work, and yet there is nowhere to shop for food in town. I’ve spent my whole life on this farm, 15 minutes away, and I was never really involved in Hudson. Never really that aware. It’s embarrassing to say that I didn’t know, but that’s how it happened that I became aware.
Rolling Grocer is like an action-research project born out of my husband Steffen and my initiative—the Institute for Mindful Agriculture. We asked ourselves: Is it possible to bring wholesome and healthy food to people and give everyone a chance to experience a sense of community? Income disparity is one of our greatest global challenges. Could we make even the smallest step in growing mindful awareness of one another? Food and agriculture could become a defining leverage point for social change.
So, I initiated the project through a grant. When the store reopened after the coronavirus pandemic, I took on two roles: store manager and project director. Now I’ve stepped back and hired a store manager.
You and Steffen also started the farm store on Hawthorne Valley Farm many years ago. What makes Rolling Grocer different?
What’s special is that Rolling Grocer is truly non-profit oriented. All our decisions, even the layout of the store, are made not only to sell more product and make money, but to encourage people to encounter each other, to build community together.
One thing is the prices I told you about. People become aware of each other—that some have more, some have less—and they contribute based on their needs, knowing they are part of a larger group of customers and part of a community.
The store is small—not much bigger than this room, really—and long. Along the length of the store, I arrange the vegetables in very low coolers, so people can see each other over them. Then there’s prepared foods, cheeses, beverages, frozen foods, meats, and the bulk section, where you bring your own containers to fill. At the end is where I am, and the cash registers. So people walk along either side of this long arrangement, and it’s nice. It gives people space. They come in, they talk across the vegetables—it becomes a meeting place.
And does it work, letting people choose their own price? Are there enough people who “get it” and pay the higher tier price?
A lot of wealthy people moved to rural places like Hudson from New York City after September 11th and COVID. They bought property in Hudson and renovated beautiful homes. But Hudson also has a lot of low-income residents who require government food assistance, and many families where two parents work, or one parent has two jobs to make ends meet. If you are wealthy, you can drive to the big shopping centers, but some residents have no car or only one car. We try to meet the needs of the whole spectrum. So, we do have many wealthy people who shop with us because we have very high-quality food, and it’s convenient.
But basically, all our shoppers provide Rolling Grocer with sales and income. Yes, it works, but it’s more complicated than that. For a small shop to be healthy and invest in itself, it needs a margin of 35 to 40%. That’s the amount above what you paid for the goods you are selling. I had a long conversation at last year’s Agriculture Conference with a gentleman from the Odin cooperatives in the Netherlands. With over 15,000 members, they can afford much lower margins for high-quality food. But for small natural food enterprises, you need a larger margin to meet your costs and still have a profit.
Our blue tier only has a 10% margin, the orange 25%, and the green 40%. You can do the math. In 2024, for example, we ended with a margin of only 20% from all three tiers. So, I need to raise money to close the gap between what we are taking in and our expenses. That makes us a grocery store that also receives donations—a nonprofit grocery store.
Then the people who pay the highest price don’t fully compensate for the people who pay the lowest price?
No. They contribute, because they’re paying full price, of course. We used to have a fourth price tier, but that doesn’t really work. There’s already a 40% markup, and then you’re going to make it even more expensive? I believe there’s a fair exchange market price, and if you stray too far away, people don’t feel comfortable. My intuition is that you have to keep it within a boundary.
Which means I have to raise about $250,000 extra a year to break even. So I asked ten individuals and foundations to give between $25,000–$50,000. If you’re a person of high net worth, that’s manageable. People who shop at the store and give donations know what they’re supporting. Someone who donates $25,000, well, it’s a gesture—an anonymous one, because I know who they are when they come in to shop, but nobody else does. It’s just the satisfaction of knowing you are contributing to the community and offering something back to your neighbor, you know?
An interesting aspect of this project has been learning how the food economy works. The bigger you are, the greater the discounts you get from the distributors who sell you the products that you sell to the customer: big stores get the best prices because of volume. I’m this little tiny store. So, I asked the store manager at Hawthorne Valley Farm Store, which is my own home farm store and is much bigger, if we could purchase from distributors together, which allows us both to receive greater discounts.
There’s also a program that New York state runs called Double Up Food Bucks. For every dollar of groceries that you buy, you get $1 of free fruits and vegetables, up to $20. So, you can get your meat, your fish, your eggs, your everything, and if you spend over $20, then you get $20 of fruits and vegetables. Now, $20 of fruits and vegetables is a lot, and that’s every time you come in the store! At the end of the month, we get a reimbursement check from Double Up Food Bucks. What’s special is that to get this benefit, people have to already be getting food stamps (financial assistance from the government). And it’s very interesting: people who are really struggling say, I’m going to use my food stamp card for X, Y, and Z, and then my Double Up Food Bucks card for my fruits and vegetables—they know exactly what they’re spending and how to stretch their budget. So this is really helpful to them.
It’s beautiful how you describe all this. You’ve worked within the unique social-financial configuration of your area and created a marketplace that helps people in your community to help each other—this keeps the community within the community. How did this way of working evolve for you?
Community for me came in stages. I was the gardener at Hawthorne Valley Farm. I worked with the vegetables—I grew them, I loved them, and I started our CSA (community supported agriculture) groups. In my younger days, I helped start two Waldorf schools. If you’re entrepreneurial, you can’t help yourself. So I was working on two and a half to three hectares, and we had about 300 CSA members. But it got to the point where I physically couldn’t do it. And I was never really suited for it. I’m more of a teacher type. So, I moved into farm-based education: working with children, giving biodynamic trainings, and giving young farmers business classes. Young farmers are so in love with the earth and work so hard, but then you show them a budget, and their eyes are like, “What?” And I have to say, “Hey! It’s a business. Come on now. You’ve got to get into the finances.” So, I taught my “Farm Beginnings” courses and my husband, Steffen, gave biodynamic trainings, and in 2014, we started the small Institute for Mindful Agriculture.
Then we opened Rolling Grocer in 2018. Before that, we had a truck that drove around, and people shopped from the truck. Hence the name. When it finally incarnated as a storefront, we had one year, then Corona hit. So we developed an online ordering system where people could pick up without going into the store. Since 2022, we’ve been a fully functioning store again. We also have a home delivery program for residents who are older or can’t get out. They order online or by phone, we fill and deliver their order, and we don’t charge for that. And we make it part of our mission to purchase and sell as much as we can from our local and regional farmers and food processors. We now have close to 50 different small producers and processors in this store.
Have people seen what you’re doing and tried it elsewhere?
People have taken notice, but no one has started a store like ours. Yet! Some University of Kansas researchers saw our presentation at a conference and said, “We would like to do a case study of Rolling Grocer.” So I have been feeding them detailed information. I get phone calls; a group of initiators from rural Alabama came up; a contact from the NYU School of Business interviewed me.
The whole thing is open source: if you want to know, I’m going to tell you. If someone wants to do what we’re doing, I would love it. Especially if it could be called a Rolling Grocer. Not because I want to own anything. But if we could brand ourselves, and do some collective purchasing, or build some collective infrastructure warehousing, well, that interests me and Steffen deeply. It addresses the associative economic question that’s close to our hearts.
I’d like to write a manual on how to start a Rolling Grocer store. If you look at the Hudson River as the spine, there are communities all along on either side until you get to New York City. I’d like there to be two more Rolling Grocers south of us, closer to the city. And I’d like to see if we can start some associative work together.
At every level, you and Steffen are connecting people and encouraging community. This is more than a social experiment, it’s social artistry! What does this take—what qualities do you need to bring to it?
For the Institute for Mindful Agriculture to work, mindfulness has to be in myself, in my attitudes, in how I configure myself socially, in mindfulness of the soil, and in the social realm. Both Steffen and I have noticed that what defeats us in the world of regenerative or biodynamic or organic agriculture is often not that we don’t know how to farm or how to take care of our soils, but rather that we don’t seem to know how to work together. Building our “social soil” involves learning deep listening practices for a certain kind of knowing to emerge out of a group to solve particular challenges. So listening, I would say. Deep listening and not having a previous agenda, being willing to let go of your own opinion, and just being open and vulnerable.
These qualities that you bring to your work are quite unusual in the world of business.
Well, if I think about what I just said, perhaps these would be considered “feminine” qualities, although they are certainly NOT restricted to women. And are more of these qualities necessary in business? Yes, I definitely think so!
Rachel, where do you find your inspiration and direction? What’s at the heart of all this for you?
The most important thing for me personally is where and how I find my way to a real experience of the Christ being in my daily life. The first time I heard about anthroposophy, I was at a very hippie, radical college, where a professor was talking about Steiner and his work. Quite soon after, I went to the Waldorf School in California because I was interested in education, and my first exposure was a Michaelmas festival. I was, like they say in French, bouleversé. There was a pageant and the children were naming Michael, and I said, “I have no idea who this being is, but I am for him.” Straight as an arrow. I was only 23, but you know, boom. So for me, this question from my everyday being to the Christ being and to my higher self—this whole path is where the strength comes to do any kind of work. That’s where I feel I have to work the hardest to be true to something that I can then bring into my limbs in a non-distorted way, but in a true, clear way.
This has been very inspiring. Thank you so much, Rachel.
This article is part of a series of conversations that explore qualities of the feminine to bring them into greater conscious awareness and to consider how they might help in addressing the needs of our current world situations.
More Rolling Grocer, Institute for Mindful Agriculture, Hawthorne Valley Farm
Images Community at the Rolling Grocer. Photos: Colleen Trainor
