Teaching materials

In recent years, the topic of ‘healthy’ eating has been brought to our attention over and over again. The addition of colourings, flavourings and other additives, the concept of ‘5 a day’, the excessive amount of salt and sugar and fats – saturated, unsaturated and trans fats, school meals, fast food and microwave meals are a few of the areas which have been focused on.

There is one business – a different kind of business that has had ‘health’ at its heart since the 1800s – the Co-operative business.

Appalled by the dishonest practices of many retailers (which included adding salt to sugar, floor sweepings to tea and ground bones to flour), a group of men came together with a vision to change the world, through fair and honest practices.

On the 21^st December 1844 they opened their modest shop in Toad Lane, Rochdale. This shop was a different kind of shop – a co-operative shop that sold basic foodstuffs to members of the community – a shop with a heart. A shop that put people, not profit at its heart and provided foodstuffs that were free from adulteration, weighed and measured honestly and sold at reasonable prices.

Their shop was a far cry from today’s supermarkets with their shelves stocked with a huge variety of products for both everyday use and those for special occasions. The Toad Lane shop stocked only four products initially. Products that were specially chosen because the Rochdale Pioneers knew they could sell them on.