• September 4, 2026

Celebrating 50 Years of the Middlebury Co-op!

The grass was still wet with dew at 6am as the first volunteers arrived on the Middlebury Green. It was quiet and cool, and a long list of to-dos remained undone with only a few hours to go before the first visitors would arrive. Corey Janus, our outside event coordinator, immediately began assigning jobs. Banners went up on the gazebo. Tables and chairs were laid out for our Co-op Connection partners under the long tent. Picnic areas were set up near the food trucks, seating put out by the main stage, and pop tent after pop tent staked across the sloping park. Within minutes, everyone’s shoes were soaked.

The raffle was the first part of the day to outgrow its plan. So many items had been donated by our Co-op Connection partners and other vendors that one table could not hold all the prizes; a second was still a tight fit.

Raffle tickets weren’t sold. To get one, you simply had to talk with a Co-op Connection partner, ask a Board member a question, or strike up a conversation with a local vendor. The price of a ticket was conversation, and you could buy as many as you liked.

Signs were still going up at 9:30 as the first visitors started arriving. 

At 10 on the dot, The Eschatones – featuring Kai Stanley from the Co-op’s Front End team – officially kicked off the festivities with a 30 minute set. For a moment, the turnout looked respectable, but modest. A quick glance at the time: It was only 10:10. by 10:30, the park was really starting to fill.

By the time Liz Reedy and Nick Bredice took the stage at 10:45, crowds were congregating, but there was no single center to the celebration. 

Vendors shared space with new and returning Co-op Connection Partners who filled the tent that ran parallel to the Co-op Hub, selling goods and introducing themselves to Co-op members. Many of this year’s participants are offering 10% off their goods and services for Co-op members! 

Tom Verner’s magic show drew children and adults toward the stage, and one of the designers behind the Co-op’s 50th Anniversary artwork was even drafted into the performance.

Between sets, the stage became an arena for unusually practical competition. MC Bruce Baker recruited volunteers to identify the contents of unlabeled cans, and cut a slice of bread with the most consistent thickness.

Children outnumbered adults among the contestants, making us especially glad we had invested in cut-resistant gloves. The thickness of the winning slice varied by only one-tenth of a millimeter from top to bottom—an almost absurdly precise result.

By early afternoon, every communal picnic table was occupied, often comprised of people who had not arrived together.

It was warm but not overly hot; a light breeze and shade from the trees kept it comfortable. It was the kind of summer day people dream about all year and sometimes never get. We couldn’t have been luckier with the weather.

American Flatbread, Steven’s Farm Stand, La Chapina, and Sisters of Anarchy served a steady lunch crowd, while Co-op Connection partners, local businesses, and community organizations filled the surrounding tents. One food-truck operator told us afterward, “We made more today than we have over the last three events we’ve worked—and we needed that money.”

Listeners gathered beneath the entertainment tent and on blankets above the stage.

People moved from the tie die station to face painting, from bubbles to cornhole and Connect Four. They talked with vendors, entered a raffle, and circled back to top of the hill to do it all again.

Adults and children alike gravitated towards the giant bubble wands.

Quotes from audio stories that would be told in full at the evening’s gallery opening were posted on trees across the park, starting conversations and sparking curiosity for that evening’s event.

Conversations unfolded under every tent and at every stopping point along the path.  The Co-op’s aisles have always been places where shopping pauses for a conversation. On August 22, that expanded to the scale of the Middlebury Town Green.

On the hill above the Co-op Hub, giant bubbles erased any remaining distinction between children’s and adults’ activities. At one point, every wand in use was taken by an adult while children waited for a turn.

Enormous bubbles lifted over the park, glancing off tents, trees, and unsuspecting guests; those that remained intact longest drew spectators of their own.

David the Bubble Guy – A.K.A. David from the Co-op Deli – spent weeks perfecting his bubble solution to match the temperature and humidity of the day. He quietly kept the station running, offering guidance when needed and demonstrating the best techniques for making giant bubbles. In the end, he worked beyond his scheduled hours because, he said, he was having so much fun.

The temporary tattoos followed a similar trajectory as the bubbles. Designed largely with children in mind, they seemed to appear on more adult arms and faces than kids.

The Co-op Hub stayed busy all day, with people buying 50th Anniversary merchandise, starting or renewing their memberships, and taking home commemorative posters through our one-day membership offer. 

At the Board table, the invitation was simple: ask a question and spin the prize wheel. Some visitors undoubtedly stopped for the raffle entry or prize or to sign the giant Co-op birthday card, but many stayed to learn more about what the Board does and how a community-owned grocery store actually works.

Holding court at the raffle table was Sean M., a former Co-op employee who had spent weeks asking to come down from Burlington and volunteer. He spent the day talking with – and probably befriending – nearly everyone who stopped by to throw their ticket in the ring for a prize.

That he wanted to spend his Saturday helping a place where he no longer worked says more about what the Co-op means to people than any anniversary speech could.

(For the record: despite his objections, we did pay him.)

The Co-op closed for two hours at noon so staff working a Saturday shift at the store could join the celebration. Sabouyouma took the stage just as the first wave of employees arrived.

Their set, built around drums and the bandleader’s remarkably fast, precise balafon playing, carried across the Green. A small group danced near the stage as the rest of the celebration continued around them.

At three, the band finished its final song and the daytime celebration came to a close.

From the Town Green to the Memory Gallery

A few hours later, many familiar faces reappeared across Main Street at Town Hall Theater—now in evening clothes and, in several cases, still wearing temporary tattoos from the park.

The Green was a celebration of the Co-op in the present tense. Inside the Jackson Gallery, the celebration reached back 50 years.

The doors between the gallery and the pavilion stood open to the clear, warm evening. A light breeze moved through as visitors circulated among the exhibit, the music, and the gathering outside. Photographs, newsletters, documents, artifacts, and recorded voices traced the Co-op from its buying-club beginnings to the store we know today.

The gallery was designed not simply as a timeline of what happened between 1976 and 2026, but as a portrait of the people, relationships, work, choices, experiments, mishaps, and ordinary moments that made the Co-op what it is today. From the earliest buying-club years to the store we know now, the exhibit traces a history created by thousands of people figuring out, together, what it means to own something in common.

Headphones with adapters ere available so guests could scan the QU codes scattered across the exhibit and listen to stories told by people who had been there; They paused over familiar faces in photographs spanning five decades, and added their own photographs and memories to the community wall. The result was not a history sealed off in the past, but an archive still being made.

Deep Think provided the evening’s soundtrack with instrumental jazz arrangements of familiar popular songs, which proved to be an enormous hit.

Before the evening ended, we paused for a few words of thanks. The celebration itself lasted one day; the work behind it had taken months and drawn on generosity from across the community.

A clear moon rose over the theater as evening settled in and the band played under the cafe lights on the plaza. To the observant eye, the tableau looked a lot like the event poster that advertised it.

Made Possible by Many Hands

The celebration was built much as the Co-op itself has been built over the past 50 years: by people contributing what they had to offer. Some gave time or labor; others gave expertise, equipment, food, money, trust, or the answer to a question no one else knew.

Businesses and organizations throughout the community were extraordinarily generous. Casella donated the trash, recycling, and compost receptacles that helped us manage waste from a full day on the Green. Dundon’s provided a handwashing station. MC Bruce Baker donated 2/3 of his fee back to the Co-op. Store vendors and Co-op Connection partners filled two raffle tables with prizes. Others shared hard-earned event knowledge, made introductions, solved last-minute problems, and helped us navigate the countless details behind a day that, to most visitors, simply seemed to unfold.

With Gratitude, In Cooperation

We are deeply grateful to the Town of Middlebury, and especially Beth Dow, for working with us through the many logistical details of bringing a celebration of this size to the Town Green.

Our enormous thanks go to Town Hall Theater, and especially Ellie Friml and Lisa Mitchell, who gave us not just a gallery, but their patience, flexibility, problem-solving, and seemingly endless willingness to help us figure out how to bring an ambitious idea to life. 

Thank you to the Better Middlebury Partnership, especially Kathryn Torres and Kelly Flynn, for generously sharing their experience and advice as we learned how to plan a large downtown event, and to Hannah Hoopaugh, who was an absolute tour de force of practical, on-the-ground support.

We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Patricia Boera and the Middlebury Festival on the Green, who graciously shared years of hard-earned event knowledge with us. There seemed to be no question too large or too obscure: vendor recommendations, Dig Safe requirements, lighting plans, park logistics — even who to call when yellowjackets took up residence in an electrical box we very much needed to use. Every answer saved us time, trouble, or both.

Thank you to the Addison Independent, and especially Katy Foote, Christy Lynn, and Elsie Parini, for the extraordinary help, patience, coverage, and support they provided in the months leading up to August 22—from advertising and special features to helping us tell the story of why reaching 50 years matters.

A huge thank-you goes to Corey Janus, whose production experience, unflappable problem-solving, and no-nonsense execution helped kept a daunting number of moving parts on course. The fact that both events appeared to unfold so naturally was, in no small part, the result of Corey’s work behind the scenes.

Thank you to Brand Animism for creating the visual language of our 50th year — from the anniversary marks to the collection of icons drawn from the Co-op’s history. And special thanks to Matthew Rudnicki, who immersed himself in the Co-op’s history and undertook the enormous task of digitizing and archiving 50 years of analog Co-op newsletters, preserving a resource that will continue to tell us things about ourselves long after the anniversary is over.

And none of it could have happened without our Co-op staff. In the final days before August 22, staff across the store took on extra shifts, strange schedules, last-minute projects, event setup, gallery work, problem-solving, hauling, organizing, and some extremely late nights to get everything over the finish line. Many of them then got up and came back to work the celebration itself. We are enormously grateful.

Finally, thank you to every person who sat down and told us a Co-op story for the 50th Anniversary archive; to everyone who loaned us photographs, documents, and pieces of their own history; and to those whose stories we have yet to record. The history of this Co-op does not live in a filing cabinet. It lives in the memories of the people who built it, worked here, shopped here, farmed for us, served on the Board, raised their children here, made friends here, and kept coming back. We hope to continue preserving those voices long after the anniversary year has ended.

Here’s to the Next 50

Above all, thank you to our community—to everyone who filled the Town Green by day and the Memory Gallery that evening, to those who have shopped at the Co-op for decades, and to those who walked through our doors for the first time this year.

A community-owned grocery store exists only because a community keeps choosing to own it—not only on paper, but in practice: by shopping, working, questioning, contributing, and caring what becomes of it. For 50 years, those choices have carried the Co-op from a small group of neighbors buying food together to an organization that serves thousands of households, supports hundreds of local farmers and producers, employs our neighbors, and returns resources to the community around us.

August 22 gave us an opportunity to look back at everything that brought us here. More than that, it made 50 years of community ownership visible over the course of a single day.

We are here because you are. Thank you for the first 50 years.

Here’s to the next 50 years of owning a grocery store together.

The Memory Gallery will remain on view at Town Hall Theater’s Jackson Gallery through September 18, 2026.

• September 4, 2026
• The Spotlight, Uncategorized, View All