5 Big-Name Cooperative Businesses
November 30, 2025
By Nadia Cabrera-Mazzeo, Esq.
More and more people are looking to the cooperative business model as we suffer through the consequences of the anticompetitive, profit-maximizing shareholder-first approach taken by most companies since the 1980s. With sky-high costs of living, stagnant wages, rigid workplace policies, and rising prices despite lower product quality, there is widespread dissatisfaction
among workers and consumers.
In the for-profit context, cooperatives are regular businesses that are owned and democratically controlled by workers, consumers, or other stakeholders. Instead of going to a handful of shareholders, profits go directly into the pockets of worker or consumer-owners. Cooperative businesses can be so successful in competing with conventional counterparts that most people don’t even know they are cooperatively structured. Here are 5 examples of big-name
cooperative businesses.
1. Ace Hardware
Ace Hardware is a retail cooperative, meaning each independently-owned store pools resources to get wholesale discounts from suppliers, the benefits of marketing under one brand, and centralized training. Ace is not a worker co-op, so workers at the stores don’t share ownership or profits. Instead, individual store owners purchase a share in the national cooperative corporation and get a share of profits on a national level. While store owners have a high degree of autonomy over their stores, they still have to follow certain practices dictated by the national co-op.
2. Ocean Spray
Ocean Spray, one of the leading brands of cranberry juice, is an agricultural cooperative owned by small cranberry farmers. It started when 3 farmers came together to sell value-added cranberry products and is now collectively owned by about 700 family farms.
3. Land O’Lakes
Land O’ Lakes is owned by both farmers and agricultural retailers, including over 500 crop farmers, 1,200 dairy farmers, and 800 retailers. When a co-op is owned by more than one group of stakeholders, it is a multistakeholder cooperative. Many of the member-owners are other cooperatives organizations.
4. Sunkist
Another agricultural co-op, Sunkist is owned by citrus growers in California and Arizona. Sunkist has been around since 1893 and in 1907, the Sunkist group founded a sister cooperative, the Fruit Growers Supply Company, to purchase supplies and manage timberlands and mills for the Sunkist growers.
5. REI
Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) is well-known as a cooperative. Shoppers can pay a one-time fee of $30 to become members and receive yearly profit-sharing dividends based on how much they shop at the store. This is a classic consumer cooperative.
There are many types of cooperatives, for-profit and nonprofit alike, and infinite ways to apply the cooperative model to a business venture. While not always the right fit, in the same way that a corporation or LLC is not always the right fit for a specific purpose, the cooperative model is a highly underutilized business tool but it is starting to gain more steam as awareness of this option grows. It is important for business lawyers to educate themselves on the cooperative model and co-op law and present it as an option for groups looking to go into business together.
Looking to start a co-op in New Mexico? Honest Contracts can help.
Law office of Nadia Cabrera-Mazzeo, Esq.
Small business and contracts lawyer
Based in Taos, serving clients throughout New Mexico
505 427 2025
nadia@honestcontracts.com
The information on this website is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. The rates and fees listed on this website may not be the most up to date.
