Our History

As a company, our roots go back to 1996. Our founders, Walden Swanson and Kate Sumberg, developed a financial benchmarking program, called CoCoFiSt (Common Cooperative Financial Statements), for natural food retail grocery cooperatives. CoCoFiSt was developed in partnership with Cooperative Development Servicesand CDS Consulting Co-op – important strategic partnerships that continues to this day.

Based on the success of CoCoFiSt, Chuck Snyder, CEO of the NCB (National Cooperative Bank) suggested to Walden and Kate that other cooperative communities could benefit from benchmarking and that they should form a company to deliver benchmarking for independent businesses – and CoopMetrics was born.

CoopMetrics was incorporated on July 31, 2003, as the first Minnesota 308B cooperative under that state’s new cooperative statute. CoopMetrics is a hybrid cooperative with three classes of membership, including worker, investor and consumer. At launch, only the worker and investor classes were opened. Our first board of directors had two directors from the worker class, Kate Sumberg and Brad Langhorst, and two representing the investor class, Chuck Snyder, CEO of NCB; and Annie Donovan, COO of NCB Capital Impact.

In 2003, CoopMetrics also added its second benchmarking sector, AMAROK, a cooperative of independent drywall distributors. CoopMetrics also began an on-going process of investing in technology enhancements that simplify data submission, enhance scalability, improve reporting features and add valuable operational tools.

Since 2003, CoopMetrics has added programs for farm supply and marketing cooperatives, affordable housing developers, independent natural food retailers, alternative nursing homes (The Green House project), independent flooring retailers and small scale meat processors.

In 2009, the National Cooperative Grocers Association (NCGA) became the first consumer member of CoopMetrics. NCGA’s CEO, Robynn Shrader, joined the CoopMetrics board of directors as the first director from the consumer class.