Co-ops provide a new business model that keeps the food supply going for small towns.

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• Research shows a “brain gain” trend with people in their 30s and 40s moving to rural areas.
• Independent grocers in rural Minnesota compete by offering specialized knowledge and local products.
• Many rural grocery store owners plan to retire soon, creating a succession crisis.

Ryan Pesch grew up in East Grand Forks, went to college in St. Peter, and during his 20s spent five years in St. Paul working at Mississippi Market, where he internalized the food co-op model. Then in 2004, when he and his wife Maree had the chance to move to Otter Tail County and take a job with University of Minnesota Extension, they went. They have not looked back.

“Other than my little stint in St. Paul, I’ve always been a northern Minnesota person,” Pesch said.

Today he and Maree co-manage Manna Food Co-op in Detroit Lakes — a store that opened in 2017, grew out of the local farmers market, and now works with over 40 vendors within 100 miles, impressing the city slickers who come through during the summer. Pesch is not surprised they’re surprised, as he’s been watching people underestimate rural Minnesota for 25 years.

The conventional story about rural Minnesota and its grocery stores goes something like this: young people leave, towns shrink, stores close, the slide continues. It is a story with enough truth in it to feel accurate and enough missing to be misleading. Pesch has heard it so many times he can recite it. “Maybe somebody that’s not familiar with rural Minnesota,” he said, “I think you just get the impression like it’s just a desolate wasteland, people are hooked on opioids, everybody else is unemployed. And I just don’t think that’s true.”

At last count, roughly 250 independent grocers — out of the more than 1,700 statewide — serve Minnesotans who live in the 400 or so small towns and cities of fewer than 10,000 people. They serve as a bulwark against state and national trends. As Investigate Midwest reported last year, citing USDA data, the top four grocery chains controlled 13% of nationwide sales in 1990, climbing to 34% in 2019.

Ben Winchester, a rural sociologist with University of Minnesota Extension who has spent nearly 30 years studying small towns across the Midwest, has the research to back that up. His so-called brain gain work documents a decades-long pattern of people in their 30s and 40s choosing to move to rural Minnesota — drawn by lower costs, outdoor access, and something harder to quantify about pace and community. The Pesches are not an outlier: They’re part of a trend. 

“We don’t live and work in the same place anymore. This isn’t 1910,” Winchester said. “We live in these vast regions. Your grocery store closed in one of these small towns 35, 40 years ago. Now we have artifacts of our past on our main street. But our homes are still full.”

Manna did not begin as a response to a food desert. It grew out of a question asked at the farmers market one summer: Why doesn’t this community have a year-round outlet for what gets sold here? Pesch, fresh from years at Mississippi Market and two decades as an educator in community economic development and ag business management, joined the board. They found members, built a model, and opened in August 2017.

The store joined INFRA, a national cooperative buying network for independent natural food retailers, and Pesch said the impact was immediate: “Like night and day, compared to how we were able to compete in terms of grocery previously.” They got bulk pricing, plus a peer network of independent operators navigating the same pressures. The co-op model, he said, is what makes the whole thing work — not just the buying power but the shared knowledge.

Pesch is clear-eyed about the competition, which is everyone. Walmart, Aldi, Thrive Market, online meal kit makers, specialty and natural grocers when customers pass through the metro. Walmart captures roughly 1 in 4 dollars spent on groceries nationally and can undercut any independent on price. Manna doesn’t try. “We can talk about different forms of magnesium better than the person at CVS,” Pesch said. 

The store works directly with over 40 vendors within 100 miles — direct billing, direct invoicing, direct ordering — building a local supply chain that a chain grocer could never replicate. Pesch describes it as genuinely hard, unglamorous, and daily work.

“People get excited about local foods,” he said. “It’s not sexy, but if you consistently work with a set of vendors and farmers over time, you can build a working supply chain so that you consistently have good products on the shelf every day.”

One of Manna’s less obvious achievements is expanding the market beyond the stereotypical co-op shopper. The good food movement has shifted since Pesch first walked into a food co-op in 1997. What was once largely a politics of the progressive Midwest now cuts across lines he couldn’t have predicted then. In rural Minnesota, he said, you’re as likely to find a religious homeschooling family drawn to local food as a retired radical from the 60s doing their thing on the lake. Manna has both.

“The dyed-in-the-wool liberal who drives a Subaru can come shop and feel comfortable,” Pesch said. “And the guy packing heat, who’s a die-hard Ron Paul fan, can also come shop.” The entire store is deliberate about this: “I try not to let the politics get in the way of good food.”

What Manna represents is one version of what rural grocery can look like when it works.

What happens when a rural grocery store closes?

The harder question is what happens in the communities that haven’t found their Ryan Pesch yet — and there are many — or what to do once he’s ready to retire. 

Zachary Paige, who coordinates University of Minnesota Extension’s program for regional partnerships in Moorhead and works directly with rural store owners across the state, tracks the succession question closely. Two-thirds of rural Minnesota grocery store owners don’t plan to own their stores in 10 years. Few have a written transition plan. Only 30% of rural small business sales close successfully on the first attempt. Grocery makes that harder — industry-wide net profit margins average 1.6%, thin enough that a single equipment failure can end a rural store.

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“I’ve talked to many owners for 10 years,” Paige said, “and they admit they’re not completely confident in their skills even though they’ve learned a lot. They are doing it as a labor of love.”

When a store does close, the effects travel. A 2022 study in the “International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health” tracked dietary and behavioral changes in a rural community after its main store closed, for better or worse. An analysis from the non-partisan think tank Population Reference Bureau found that a single rural closure can ripple through a community’s entire social infrastructure. 

Paige frames it as a domino: “If that store went away, how many fewer people would be going to the downtown area?” Rural Minnesota already has roughly 230,000 residents living more than 10 miles from the nearest store.

The most common succession pattern Paige sees isn’t a clean generational handoff — it’s a grocery operator from a regional center absorbing the location into an existing business, which amounts to an informal consolidation with no policy framework and no guarantee of permanence. State support exists but is overextended: Minnesota’s Good Food Access Program received nearly three times more grant requests than available funding in 2025. Training programs like Columinate’s Mighty Community Markets course are beginning to address the skill gap Paige describes. A statewide University of Minnesota Extension survey of rural grocery conditions is planned for 2027 — meaning the most current comprehensive data is already several years old.

“Increasing the fund would be one easy way to support grocery stores for the state to consider,” Paige said.

Winchester, the rural sociologist, argues that the communities that figure this out will do so the way rural Minnesota has always done things — with civic infrastructure.

“We have managed all of these changes — school consolidations, farm crises, everything — through our chambers, our school boards, our city councils,” he said. “We have done all this with volunteers for decades. We’re still here.” 

A quarter of rural residents are self-employed in some form. The entrepreneurial instinct is present.

“In a small town,” Winchester said, “you can afford to try.”

Ryan Pesch tried. He came back to rural Minnesota when he could, built a supply chain out of 40 local vendors, and opened a store with his neighbors that surprises people who thought they knew what Detroit Lakes had to offer. Manna is not a solved problem — the competition is real, the margins are thin, the work is unglamorous. But the lights are on, the produce department is full, and wherever you are on the political spectrum there’s something for you on the shelf.

Across the Midwest, communities are making versions of the same bet. In Conway Springs, Kansas, a teacher and a welder built a replacement grocery store by hand after their town went without one for years. 

In Minnesota, dozens of communities will face a similar reckoning as the current generation of owners ages out. The question isn’t whether rural Minnesota can sustain a grocery store; it’s whether the next generation shows up before the lights go out.

Cole Hanson is a clinical dietitian.

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