Fiscal year ended June 2026; cooperative-wide, not my budget
Independent grocery stores supplied
293
Owned by 214 member companies in five states
Colleagues in my organisation
2,140
Two distribution centres, fleet, eleven operated stores and food safety
A considered point of view.
A delivery window, a written quota and a posted store schedule are each a promise about somebody's hours. I try to know whose hours they are before we make the promise, and to tell the people asking for it what it will cost. In a cooperative those people are also our owners, which makes candour about trade-offs a duty rather than a courtesy.
Selected leadership work / 01
Capping freezer hours before the 2022 holiday peak
In August 2022 our freezer selectors at Kent were averaging fifty-two hours a week, and the holiday plan assumed more.
I run a member-owned grocery supply chain on the view that each promise to a store owner is paid for in somebody's working hours.
I am chief operating officer of Hollisford Grocers Cooperative, a wholesale cooperative headquartered in Kent, Washington, and owned by the neighbourhood and small-town grocers it supplies. Its 214 member companies operate 293 stores across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. Net sales for the fiscal year ended June 2026 were US$2.14 billion. My organisation of 2,140 people runs our two distribution centres, a fleet of 186 tractors, the eleven stores the cooperative operates itself, food safety and quality, and the services we sell to member stores. I report to our president and chief executive and present regularly to a board on which nine of the eleven directors are elected member retailers.
I came to this work through transport planning rather than store management. At a foodservice distributor in Spokane, I learnt that a delivery time agreed casually in an afternoon phone call becomes a driver's two o'clock start and a loader's compressed night. I have kept that sequence in view for thirty-one years. In a cooperative it matters twice over, because the store owner asking for an earlier truck is also one of the people who own the business and elect its directors.
The decisions on this site share one discipline: making the cost of a promise visible to the people who will carry it. We shortened the hours selectors spend in our freezer, withdrew a supplier's entire chilled salad line when our lot records could not narrow a recall, and began charging members for the delivery windows that set the size of our fleet. None of those choices was free. I record who disagreed with each one and what it cost us.
Fewer freezer injuries, fewer overtime hours
Recordable injuries among freezer selectors at Kent fell from 19 in fiscal 2022 to 8 in fiscal 2024 after we capped cold-room hours. The change added about US$2.3 million of labour and equipment cost in its first year, and we lost experienced selectors who preferred the overtime.
A withdrawal drawn wider than the notice
With usable lot records for only 61 per cent of cases, we withdrew all fourteen items of a chilled salad line from 196 stores. Credits and disposal cost US$612,000. Nine days later the supplier extended its own recall to a lot we had already removed.
Delivery windows given a price
Early-morning requests fell from 64 to 47 per cent of deliveries in the first year of window-based fees, and we retired 14 tractors without replacement. Three members moved part of their purchasing elsewhere, worth about US$4.1 million a year in sales.
Current focus
I am extending lot-code scanning from chilled categories to frozen and meat receiving at both distribution centres. I am also testing whether our Alaska members can accept fixed weekly order days that follow the barge sailings from Tacoma rather than our own warehouse calendar.
Conversations I welcome
I would welcome a first independent board seat with a US consumer, food or distribution company where physical work and workforce risk sit close to the board's agenda. I can offer about twenty-four days a year, subject to our chief executive's consent and the cooperative's policy on outside directorships.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
In the boardroom
Pugetvale Food Bank NetworkDirector, not-for-profit board · 2022–present
Formation
Bachelor of science in industrial engineeringWetherell State University · 1995
Jonathan brought the freezer cap to me three weeks before our busiest season and told me exactly what it would cost and who would object. He was right about both, and he never pretended the cost had disappeared once the injuries came down.
Abigail SorensbyPresident and chief executive, Hollisford Grocers CooperativeThe full record ↗
Contact
I would welcome a first independent board seat with a US consumer, food or distribution company where physical work and workforce risk sit close to the board's agenda. I can offer about twenty-four days a year, subject to our chief executive's consent and the cooperative's policy on outside directorships.
