Rainbow Grocery Cooperative
An Outer Sunset ashram pooled its money into a buying club and opened Rainbow at 16th and Valencia in August 1975. The store has been worker-owned since 1993. It has sat on Folsom Street since 1996. Nobody there is anybody's boss. The store sells no meat and no fish.
Why go
Liz Prueitt is a co-founder of Tartine. She has shopped here for more than twenty years and been gluten intolerant for thirty. She buys organic psyllium husk powder in bulk. Milk powders go in the basket too, soy and coconut and oat. Those raise the protein in her flour blend toward wheat. Bulk corn flour, Bay Area Bee Company honey and rhubarb by the stalk fill out the rest.
Gordon Edgar has bought the cheese here since 1994. When Charles Kung closed 24th Street Cheese Co. in Noe Valley in 2022, Rainbow had already taken many of the big wheels off him. Jonathan Kauffman traced the store's line for the Chronicle in 2015. The Noe Valley Community Store, Seeds of Life, Ma Revolution and Uprisings Bakery came out of the same 1970s food system. All of them are gone. Elena Kadvany named Rainbow and Berkeley's Cheese Board Collective in 2022 as the co-ops the region kept.
Order this / avoid
- Buy: psyllium husk powder and the milk powders, both from the bulk bins.
- Buy: cheese from the counter, and ask Edgar's team what is moving.
- Avoid: planning a meat or fish shop here. The co-op sells neither.
What locals & experts say
- Liz Prueitt of Tartine, to The San Francisco Standard in May 2024, on psyllium husk:
Yes, it's essentially Metamucil, pure fiber. But for gluten-free baking, when a dough rises, psyllium traps the air and helps create structure like gluten. People use it for things like pizza dough when they want stretch.
2 - Bill Crolius, one of the commune members who opened it, to the San Francisco Chronicle:
It was a marriage between Patty Hearst politics and the organic, natural food movement.
1 - Gordon Edgar, the store's cheese buyer, to KQED in June 2021:
People think grocery stores are making bank,
he said.But we're not.
4
Good to know
- Prices: Prueitt's list, read as she gave it in May 2024, ran from $1.79 a pound for corn flour to $26.95 a pound for psyllium.
- Where: 1745 Folsom Street, at 13th, with 17,500 square feet of shop floor.
Verdict
should-visit — Work the bins first; that is where the prices are. The staff are the owners, so ask whoever weighs your flour what turns over fastest.