La Louve Co-op - Implementing Odoo for the first cooperative supermarket of its kind in Europe

Overview

Industry: Retail

Product:

High-quality food products
Often organic and eco-friendlyBedroom furniture: bed, wardrobe, dressing table

Website: https://cooplalouve.f

Some figures - 2016:

Up to 9k orders per month39.000 member companies
00k Euros of sales
6k of members

Introduction: La Louve is a cooperative supermarket in Paris, France. It is part of the Food Coop model, where members are not just customers but also actively participate in running the store.

History and Development

Origins: La Louve was inspired by the Park Slope Food Coop in New York, which has been operating since the 1970s with around 17,000 members who are both customers and volunteer workers.
Establishment: The La Louve project was launched by two Americans living in Paris. In 2011, the Les Amis de La Louve association was founded to prepare for the opening of the cooperative supermarket.
Local Support: The City of Paris and the 18th district authorities quickly supported the project as part of their effort to revitalize certain areas of the city. They introduced the project to Paris Habitat, a social housing provider, which agreed to lease a 1,450 m² space in a new building. Financial support also came from the French Public Investment Program.
Opening: After several delays, La Louve officially opened in November 2016. By the end of 2019, it had already attracted over 7,000 cooperative members.

Scale and Operations

Location: La Louve is located in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, near Simplon and Marcadet-Poissoniers metro stations.
Size: The supermarket covers 1,450 m² over two floors, with 500 m² of retail space offering 6,000 to 8,000 food and non-food products.
Operating Principles:
La Louve provides high-quality food products, often organic and eco-friendly, at lower prices than traditional supermarkets.
To shop at La Louve, customers must become cooperative members and work 3 hours per month as volunteers.
New members must also invest in the cooperative by buying a €100 share (or €10 for those receiving social assistance).

Influence and Expansion

La Louve has inspired several similar cooperative supermarket projects in France and Belgium, including La Chouette Coop (Toulouse), SuperQuinquin (Lille), Supercoop (Bordeaux), Breizhicoop (Rennes), Scopéli (Nantes), La Coop des Dômes (Clermont-Ferrand), Bees Coop (Brussels), L’éléfàn (Grenoble), Le Super Cafoutch (Marseille), Les Grains De Sel (Paris 13), La Coop sur Mer (Toulon), La Cagette (Montpellier).

La Louve continues to grow as a leading example of a cooperative and community-driven supermarket in France

Challenges

Operating a cooperative supermarket like La Louve requires close coordination among thousands of members, inventory management, suppliers, finances, and individual work schedules. Unlike traditional supermarkets, where full-time employees handle operations, La Louve follows a cooperative model in which each member contributes working hours in exchange for the right to shop. This makes management significantly more complex.

A comprehensive management system is essential to:

Automate operations, reducing manual tasks and errors.
Manage inventory efficiently to meet members' needs without waste.
Track members' work schedules, ensuring enough personnel to run the supermarket daily.
Ensure transparent financial and accounting management, in line with the cooperative model.

Solution

The project being proudly part of the sharing economy, it was clear since day 1 that the ERP would be built on top of an open-source platform and that its source code would be shared on github.
Odoo 9 was chosen because of its already wide functional coverage and ease of extensibility.
One challenge of the project was to ensure OCA-level quality of code on all contributions.

Main features and customizations

Point of Sales: scan-only process to avoid any input error
Integrations: scales, credit card/cash payment devices
Purchases: automatic optimized filling of drafts PO based on sales history
Members management: registration, onboarding, work time scheduling, mass mailings