We hope that you had a great Holiday and that this will be a healthy and happy New Year for you!

Tidal Creek has entered the latter half of our business year and are experiencing an increase in sales that happens every year in response of the focus on New Years resolutions and healthier choices.

We anticipate strong sales for the remainder of the year. With alarming food issues such as meat entering the market from cloned animals and the continued allowance of strange ingredients we hope that you will put your trust in your Co-op.

Mini Expansion / Reset Plans
We plan to begin implementing some small changes here at Tidal Creek. We have moved our administrative offices and Community Center upstairs to Suite 204. This will allow us to move forward with plans to reset the store on the first floor around the kitchen area.

The objective is to utilize our space better for customers and traffic flow, as well as to give some much needed additional storage and work space to the kitchen. Some of this need came from the Health Department’s insistence on more dish drying area and storage space, however these changes may also allow us to do more catering.

We will be taking out the walls of the offices that are right off the hallway and seating area for the deli. The staff working in these offices will have workstations either on the sales floor or in the old community room area on the first floor. Some of the deli seating will be moving into this area.

We would like to make more delicious options available from our great kitchen staff. We are excited about these changes and have been pursuing what we hope is the best direction to go. We receive requests, on a daily basis, for things such as sandwiches made to order, more vegan choices to more natural free range meat choices. In expanding our kitchen area, we hope to be able to accommodate requests like these!

We also are exploring options of making more “take-home” meal by providing a more diverse level of entrée choices. Our hope in increasing the availability of these types of meals, we might streamline the work and time of the kitchen staff, allowing us to greatly increase efficiency. Moreover, options such as this might help alleviate some of the challenges we face around parking.

As well, we are working towards a system that will begin charging separately for meat choices on the hot bar. The idea here is that this will allow us to give you more options, and of course we remain committed to having our ingredients be as close to fully organic or free range natural as we can get.

Another change we want to create is a Wellness Department Customer Service kiosk on the sales floor. This would substantially increase the availability of our Wellness staff as they would have a work station where our customers are. Also, if we can create enough space we will have a small reference area for customers to access. Thank you for your continued patronage of your locally owned Cooperative Food Market!

Cooperatively yours,
Christine McElwee