The people who have been working for the past 16 years to open a customer-owned grocery on the Wasatch Front are closer to seeing their dream finally happen.
All they need now, said the head of the Wasatch Food Co-op, is around $2 million. “It’s just a matter of time,” said Stephanie Buranek, the co-op’s board chair.
The Wasatch Food Co-op is set to be the anchor tenant in the Milk Block, which extends from 402 East to 430 East — and a fixture of the neighborhood around it on Salt Lake City’s 900 South.
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Buranek said more than 1,200 people have signed on to be member-owners of the co-op by paying for a $300 lifetime membership. And that number is growing, she said.
The goal, according to the co-op’s website, is to have 1,500 member-owners by the time the store opens at 422 E. 900 South.
The biggest hurdle, Buranek said, has been fundraising.
Startup grocery stores typically cost anywhere from $3 million to $3.5 million to build from start to finish, she said. So far, the Wasatch Food Co-op has raised about $1.2 million. That means the co-op needs to raise a little under $2 million before it can open.
Buranek said co-op organizers are working to raise the funds through grants, private family foundations, loan programs and tax-deductable donations from the public, as well as giving member-owners the opportunity to buy preferred shares.
Organizers, Buranek said, are “confident” they can meet their fundraising goals and open by the end of the year. If those goals aren’t met, that opening will be delayed.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Construction continues at the Milk Block site in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, April 22, 2025.
Wasatch Food Co-op is designed to be a full-service grocery store that focuses on locally sourced products. The store also will carry products that can‘t be sourced in Utah, Buranek said, so it can compete with conventional grocery stores.
The co-op also will provide groceries in an area that Buranek said is underserved, which is one reason the board chose the neighborhood.
“The nearest grocery store to our site is about a mile in almost every direction, sometimes several,” she said. “So it was pretty clear that this was a neighborhood in need of groceries.”
That wasn’t always the case — the building that developer Kathia Dang and her husband, Sam Sleiman, are renovating to hold the co-op was first built as the O.P. Skaggs Market, Dang said.
(Utah State Historical Society) O. P. Skaggs Market on 900 South in 1947.
In various transformations over the decades, the building was Sudbury’s Foodtown, then Super Save Discount Market in the 1960s, before becoming Southeast Market, according to the Milk Block‘s website.
Dang said she remembers when the building was Tay Do Market — an earlier Asian grocery store. Dang, who immigrated to the United States from Vietnam as a child with her family in 1975, would sometimes shop at Tay Do with her aunt.
(Paul Fraughton | The Salt Lake Tribune File) Eleanor Kondo Ream looks for ingredients at the Southeast Market in 2003.
When Southeast Market was in the building, along with Pho 28 and Melewa Bakery, Dang said she and her family would go to the bakery to get specialty pastries for Tet, the Vietnamese new year.
Inside the bakery, the owner also rented old DVDs of Chinese soap operas and movies, Dang said. Some of the DVDs were dubbed in Vietnamese, and Dang’s aunt would rent them for Dang’s grandmother.
Becoming owners of the building in 2017 was a “strategic buy” for Dang and her husband, she said. “We didn‘t want someone to come and knock it down. ... I think that we really wanted to make sure that something good remains here.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Wasatch Cooperative Market is planning on opening a cooperative grocery store in the space once occupied by Southeast Market on 900 South. Thursday, Aug. 24, 2023.
Demolition started on the building in fall 2023 and Dang and her team broke ground on the Milk Block in January 2024. They named the “very intentional community” they’re building for Harvey Milk, the late San Francisco city supervisor and LGBTQ+ icon, for whom a long stretch of 900 South is also named.
The Milk Block is scheduled to open this summer, and has commitments from several businesses to move in: a second location of the Chinese bao shop Xiao Bao Bao; Mozz Artisan Pizza; a florist, Native Flower Company; and a couples’ therapy practice, Simple Modern Therapy. Equality Utah, the LGBTQ civil-rights organization, also will be making its headquarters there.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Future office space for Equality Utah is seen on the second floor of the Milk Block site in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, April 22, 2025.
Correction, Monday, 11:54 a.m. • An earlier version of the story said Wasatch Food Co-op will be the first member-owned grocery in Utah. The first in Utah is Moonflower Community Cooperative in Moab, which started in 2013.
