In an effort to reduce congestion at its current location, the Hanover Food Cooperative, the Hanover-area grocery store located on South Park Street in Hanover, has finalized plans to expand to a second location in Lebanon.
Co-op members passed the proposal to build the new store by a vote of 290 to 38 at its annual meeting in the auditorium of Hanover High School on April 28, said Terry Appleby, the Co-op's general manager.
The 17,000-member Co-op will break ground for the new facility in the Centerra Resource Park by either the fall of 1996 or the spring of 1997, Appleby said.
He said that the Co-op managers want to complete the new facility by the "fourth quarter of 1997."
Appleby said the he expects the new store to cost between $4 and $4.5 million.
The new Co-op will be built on land owned by Dartmouth College, Appleby said.
He said Dartmouth College Real Estate will act as developer of the land and the Co-op will negotiate a long-term lease with the College.
Appleby said the new store will be similar to the old one, but it may experiment with a wider variety of products.
"We're still debating ... but we've done some surveys with members," Appleby said.
He said preliminary results of the survey suggest that Co-op members would like to see more "seafood, natural health and beauty aids and more natural products in general."
Appleby said the store's board of directors recommended the expansion because "the current site is overcrowded, and there is a lack of parking."
The current site has parking for 127 cars, according to the news release. This is not enough to serve the Co-op's estimated 10,000 customers weekly, Appleby said.
"The opportunity to move [to a new location] would satisfy our needs for more space," he said.
The current location has only 18,000 square feet of retail space, while the new location is planned to have 25,000 square feet of space.
Appleby also cited the recent financial success the store has seen in recent years as an incentive to expand.
Since 1980, the Co-op's membership tripled, and sales have risen from $5 million annually to $20 million, according to a Co-op news release.
Appleby said one reason for the overcrowding problems at the Co-op's current facility is that the store draws customers from all over the Upper Valley region.
"We're really a regional store," he said.
Appleby said while "the bulk" of the store's sales come from Hanover, more than 30 percent of revenue comes from other places in New Hampshire and Vermont.
Customers come "from New London to Woodstock to Bratford in the north," he said.
Appleby said he hopes the Lebanon store will attract customers living in Lebanon who would otherwise go to the Hanover store.
But he added that the current location will not close as a result of the expansion and he does not expect the new store to supercede the original in importance.
"The current store will remain the focus for people from Hanover," he said.
The Co-op was originally founded in 1936 by a group of Dartmouth faculty who got together to purchase hard-to-get food items from wholesalers.
"They would buy in common crates of oranges or lemons and then divvy them up in someone's garage," Appleby said.
Until 1963, when it moved to its current location, the Co-op resided in the building that is now the Dartmouth Bookstore.
The Co-op's location has been renovated three times since it moved there -- in 1973, 1985 and most recently in 1994, when 4,000 square feet of retail space was added, Appleby said.
