Case Study

La Louve - Cooperative Supermarket

Odoo for a Paris Supermarket Where Members Help Run the Store

Industry: Cooperative Food Retail
Company Size: 6,000+ Members
Users: 80+
Go-live: November 2016
Effort: Dedicated team over 18 months
Modules: Members (custom), Point of Sale, Purchase, Accounting, Inventory

About the Client

La Louve is a cooperative supermarket in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, modelled on the Park Slope Food Coop in New York. To shop there, customers become members: they buy a €100 share (€10 for people receiving social assistance) and work three hours a month in the store. The project began in 2011 with the Les Amis de La Louve association, backed by the City of Paris and the 18th district, and the store opened in November 2016. It occupies 1,450 m² over two floors, with 500 m² of retail space and 6,000 to 8,000 food and non-food products. By the end of 2019, La Louve had more than 7,000 members.

The Challenge

A Store Staffed by Thousands of Members

Instead of a team of full-time employees, La Louve relies on members who each work three hours a month. The system had to track every member's work schedule and make sure enough people were available to run the supermarket each day.

Little Room for Manual Work and Errors

With members working short shifts alongside their other commitments, day-to-day operations had to be automated wherever possible to cut manual tasks and input errors. Inventory also had to meet members' needs across thousands of products without creating waste.

Transparent Finances for a Member-Owned Business

Coordinating members, suppliers, stock and schedules is already more complex than in a traditional supermarket. As a cooperative, La Louve also needed financial and accounting management that stays transparent to the members who own it.

Why Odoo & Trobz

La Louve is part of the sharing economy, so from day one the ERP had to run on an open-source platform, with its source code shared on GitHub. Odoo 9 was chosen for its broad functional coverage and how easily it can be extended. A key requirement throughout the project was OCA-level code quality on every contribution.

What We Built

Built a custom Members app for registration, onboarding, work-time scheduling and mass mailings
Set up Point of Sale with a scan-only checkout process to avoid input errors
Integrated scales and card and cash payment devices with the checkout
Automated purchasing so draft purchase orders are filled from sales history
Implemented Odoo Accounting and Inventory for the store's finance and stock

Results

The system went live in November 2016, the month the store opened, after an 18-month project with a dedicated Trobz team.
La Louve handles up to 9,000 orders a month, with more than 80 people using the system.
By the end of 2019, the cooperative had grown to more than 7,000 members.
La Louve has since inspired similar cooperative supermarkets in France and Belgium, including SuperQuinquin in Lille, La Chouette Coop in Toulouse, Bees Coop in Brussels and La Cagette in Montpellier.