It All Started in a Little Storefront on Morgan Street...

Since 1975 Community Market has been an evolving, vital force in Sonoma County’s natural living community. Started as a collection of businesses, our parent company, the Red Clover Worker’s Brigade was founded by a diverse group of visionaries. These founding members, driven by a desire to eat, work and live more sustainably, were pioneers in distributing, selling and baking organic and natural foods.

At one point, the Red Clover Worker’s Brigade was the umbrella for five different businesses. Among these were Country People’s Warehouse, a groundbreaking effort in developing a distribution point for natural foods, and the Morningstar Trucking Collective, an all women’s trucking collective that pioneered the long-distance hauling of organic produce. Alvarado Street Bakery started out as a member business of the Red Clover Worker’s Brigade. The Bakery left the Brigade in the 1980’s, yet has retained a collective business structure. Today, Alvarado Street Bakery is an industry leader in baking organic, whole-grain breads.

The early years of Community Market were a time of great experimentation in alternative business models. The worker members spent long hours developing governance methods that reconciled their egalitarian ideals with the need to accomplish tasks in a timely and effective manner. Out of this toil grew our current business structure, which is truly unique in the natural foods industry.

At Community Market, we’re proud of our history. The groundbreaking work that defined the Market’s early years has yielded a truly unique business, one where ideals are company policy and where we see customers as our community, not as consumers.