HERO Farmed Cooperative
HERO Farmed Cooperative (HFC) has united farmers, handlers, and processors within the community under a shared cooperative enterprise. HFC has created a vertically integrated supply chain from farm to table. HFC was created to connect farms to consumers and provide pricing and efficiency advantages to all stages of the supply chain. The focus at HFC is regenerative, sustainable farming practices including non-GMO, antibiotic-free products, many of which are organic and transitioning to organic. All of it is sourced locally.
The HERO Mission
HERO stands for “Healing the Environment, Regenerating Ourselves.” Our aim is to help the community at large at both ends of the supply chain along with the processing and distribution to connect every link in the chain.
By working together as a collective group, we’re able to cut out excess middlemen and disrupt the traditional business pathways usually in these types of supply chains.
These benefits are passed on to our member farmers and onto our consumers. This helps the community overall. Given our penchant for low impact or no impact in various aspects of the chain, the environment benefits as well.
Cooperative Member Benefits
HERO Assurance was born from this concept with the aim of rethinking the insurance process to provide protection and risk mitigation to all of our members while taking advantage of the benefits of a big group enabling insurance underwriters to mitigate risk amidst the diversity of the group. This helps all involved in the process. HERO Assurance is a natural dovetail with the suite of HFC of capabilities and leverages our ability to provide benefits to HERO members.
What makes the structure of HFC unique for our members, especially as it applies to insurance in this case, is what’s known as “patronage dividends.” Since all of our members are equity owners in HFC, they get benefits of equity ownership including these dividends. As members spend money within the Coop, their contributions are considered as % contributions to overall Coop revenues. At the end of the year, these % contributions are calculated into allocations of HFC patronage dividends to each member.
These dividends could be in the form of food credits, discounts on travel, coupons for tickets to events, and dozens of other choices at each individual members’ discretion.
The association of HERO Assurance with HERO Farmed Cooperative allows everyone to benefit from these advantages that otherwise would not be achievable as an individual farm or consumer member.
Contact us to learn more about how you can take advantage of these benefits which allow our members to maximize the benefits and rewards associated with HERO.