Prairie Food CO-OP Receives over $1.5 Million from Taxpayers
This is another type of fraud – legal, but full of lies that really terrible politicians tell to unassuming voters who don’t have the wherewithal to look into the details.
Over the holidays, you may have missed the Facebook post by IL-06 Congressman Sean Casten about his visit to the Prairie Food CO-OP, where he granted $750,000 of federal funds. The Prairie Food CO-OP is located in Lombard at 837 S. Westmore-Meyers Road.
So many lies in the post – the CO-OP is NOT majority locally sourced product and it is taxpayer supported – significantly.
Prairie Food CO-OP (PFC) is the brainchild of Jerry Nash and Leslee Keri, who, according to this WGN article, have been working for about a dozen years to open their community grocery store.
“Food co-ops are basically full service grocery stores, but they focus on selling as much locally, sustainably produced food as possible,” Nash said.
“So everyone can shop there, but owners get perks. They get benefits when they shop. They can also participate in capital contributions, participate in the board…and have a say in the store, have a say in what we’re selling,” Keri said.
“Illinois has some of the most fertile soil in the world, yet we source a lot of our food that we can easily grow here from thousands of miles away,” Nash said. “We feel that we can get a lot of our food locally, and that way it’s better for our environment, it’s better for our community, it’s better for our farmers, it’s better for everybody.”
PFC opened its doors in July 2025. The Patch reported at the time of the opening that,
“The co-op opened its doors July 9 in the village’s Eastgate Shopping Center, after raising more than $4 million from local investors and grants. The funding included an $807,000 grant from the state’s Rebuild Illinois (RBI) Downtowns and Main Streets Capital initiative. In early 2023, Prairie Food Co-Op was awarded a $750,000 federal grant with the support of Rep. Sean Casten.
So, let’s be clear here – of the $4.4 million they needed to raise to open up the grocery store, over $1.5 million (35%) came from taxpayers. This store is a for-profit store. It is a competitor to every other store that offers the same product. I don’t think Jewel, Mariano’s, Target, Walmart, or any other grocery seller had the taxpayers fund 35% of their development costs. This is a socialist model, and they are lying about locally sourced food.
They insinuate that you will find mostly locally grown/sourced products in the store. It’s not true. I took a visit there and bought a basket of items at PFC, and then went and bought the identical or nearly the same product at Jewel. Overall, the Jewel cost was $1.53 more; however, Jewel was out of stock of Rao Spaghetti, an Italian product that was on sale and would have saved an additional 30 cents.
At both stores, I bought Reese’s whole water chestnuts, a product of CHINA! PFC was 20 cents cheaper.
I bought a one-pound package of 100% grassfed hamburger at both stores. The ground beef from PFC was sourced from Minnesota and cost $10.99, 50 cents more than the beef at Jewel that came from California.
Meanwhile, I bought ¼ of a cow directly from an Angus beef farmer in Illinois, which was processed by an Amish family in Illinois, and I got everything from steak to hamburger to liver at an average per-pound cost of $9. That’s local sourcing.
The pound of strawberries I bought at each store were not organic and came from California in one store and Florida in the other.
The sourdough bread in PFC was from Boulder, Colorado, and “fresh” bread from Central Illinois Bake House. Meanwhile, Damato’s Bakery on Grand Ave. in Chicago is just 20 miles away.
I noticed an unusual brand of cereal in the PFC store, but found the same brand at Jewel, so nothing special there.
The more you look into this cooperative, the more disgusted you should be that any taxpayer money was given to them. The concept is socialist; they literally state that they are about “putting people over profits,” which means they feel that profit is a dirty word. They are anti-capitalists, when capitalism has given Americans the greatest, most dynamic, and egalitarian economy on earth – just ask Eastern Europeans, Indians, and Chinese who emigrated to our country.
But the other thing is that it is a complete lie that they even try to source products locally.
Here’s what locally sourced products actually look like. From our backyard and my husband’s hard work – I take no credit for growing or canning any of this – Tomato Juice, Pasta Sauce, Salsa, Pickles, and Peaches. In front of the picture is a package of ribeyes from the cow we bought from Miller Brothers Farms.
Go ahead, have your community grocery store – there were more workers than customers in the store, btw, on a Saturday afternoon – but don’t make me finance it. And, I can’t wait to see if the unions attempt to unionize the workforce like they unionized workers at Jewel and other stores.
The politicians in this state are WASTING your money and raising your taxes for their special interests. In 2026, vote these politicians out of office.