The Wedge Co-op at Fifty: A Lyndale Avenue Institution

Born in a backyard

The Wedge Community Co-op started, as the story goes, in a backyard meeting just a few blocks from where its Lyndale Avenue store stands today. In 1974, a small group of community members decided it was time to have access to affordable, organic, whole foods without driving or busing miles out of the area.

The co-op took its name from the popular nickname for the surrounding Lowry Hill East neighborhood. Located at 2105 Lyndale Avenue South, it grew into a full-line natural-foods grocery and a certified-organic store with nearly 15,000 member-owners.

Along the way it claimed a few firsts, including an early certified-organic meat and seafood department, and added a coffee and juice bar that doubles as a neighborhood meeting spot.

A hub, not just a grocery

The Wedge has always served as a gathering place, a role that local boosters describe as anchoring the northeast corner of the neighborhood. It is routinely called a Minneapolis institution, and it now operates as part of a small family of cooperative stores alongside its Linden Hills location.

For many residents, a trip to the co-op is also a chance to run into neighbors, which is exactly the kind of small-enough-to-know-you, big-enough-to-stock-it balance the founders had in mind.

Community owned and community strong since 1974 — the store that gave the Wedge its center of gravity.

Community-owned since 1974

The Wedge Community Co-op traces its start to 1974, when a small group of neighbors gathered — by the co-op's own telling, in a basement and backyard near Franklin Avenue in Whittier, just up the hill from Lyndale — because they wanted affordable, organic, whole foods without driving miles to get them. The store at 2105 Lyndale Avenue South grew from that meeting into a full natural-foods grocery now owned by roughly 25,000 members and part of a small cooperative family that includes a second store in Linden Hills.

Along the way it claimed a few firsts — including an early certified-organic meat and seafood department — and added a coffee-and-juice bar that doubles as a neighborhood meeting spot. The co-op also took its name directly from the neighborhood: the Wedge, for the triangular shape of Lowry Hill East.

Fifty years in, still an anchor