Park Slope Food Coop Demographic Survey: Report to the Membership, December 2025
By Jordan Dunn, Vikas Hiremath, Dory Thrasher and the Equity, Access and Community Committee
The Equity, Access and Community Committee of the Park Slope Food Coop (EACC) is pleased to present our first report on the results of the Coop’s first-ever demographic survey. This data will guide policy and programmatic changes to make the Coop more equitable and accessible.
This article is a summary of the EACC’s initial report on the results of the survey. The initial report is available here. It presents descriptive statistics, offering a snapshot of the demographic breakdown of the Coop. In future reports, we will discuss the interaction between demographic factors, compare our demographic makeup to that of Park Slope and Brooklyn, and propose questions for future research.
Response rate and representativeness
The web-based survey ran from April through June 2025 and was completed by 4,711 members. This is 27 percent of the Coop’s 17,145 members.
To understand representativeness, we compared survey results to data that the Coop has on all members: zip code and retirement status. We found that the share of survey respondents per zip code is similar to the entire Coop membership: for instance, 35 percent of survey takers reported that they live in 11215 (the Coop’s zip code), compared to 34 percent of all Coop members. Similarly, 14 percent of survey respondents reported that they were retired from their Coop workslot, compared to 15 percent of the total Coop population. These comparisons give us confidence that the survey is reasonably representative.
Who we are
The demographic survey asked questions about Coop members, including age, gender, length of membership, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, religion, household composition, education, household income and other characteristics.
Years of membership: Most survey respondents have been Coop members for between 1 and 5 years (29 percent), followed by 11 to 20 years (22 percent). Twenty-two percent of survey respondents had been members for more than 20 years, while 10 percent had been members for less than a year.
Age: The largest share of Coop members are between 30 and 39 years old (29 percent), and about half (51 percent) are between 30 and 49. About 10 percent are 70 and older.
Gender: The Coop skews more female than male, with 63 percent of survey respondents identifying as female (both cisgender and transgender) and 31 percent identifying as male (both cisgender and transgender). Five percent of respondents indicated that they were nonbinary, gender nonconforming, gender fluid or intersex, and one percent preferred not to answer. Of all respondents, 2 percent indicated that they were transgender.
Sexual orientation: Seventy-one percent of respondents indicated that they were straight or heterosexual, 17 percent indicated that they were gay, lesbian or bisexual, 10 percent identified as queer, and 3 percent provided another description of their sexual orientation.
Race and ethnicity: The survey offered multiple categories and allowed people to select all that applied to them; people could also write in an answer. Seventy-six percent selected White or Caucasian; 9 percent multiracial and/or multiethnic; 8 percent Asian or Pacific Islander; 3 percent Black, African American or African; 2 percent Latino/a, Latine, Latinx, or Hispanic or Indigenous, Native American or Alaska Native; and 1 percent Arab, SWANA, Middle Eastern or North African.
Religion: This question also allowed people to select multiple checkboxes or write in an answer. A little over half (51 percent) of respondents who answered this question selected “no religion, atheist, or agnostic,” 21 percent selected Jewish and 11 percent selected Christian (any denomination). The remaining respondents selected another religion, selected multiple religious identities in combination or wrote in an answer.
Household composition: The average number of people per household is 2.12. Thirty-one percent of respondents indicated that they live in single-person households, 42 percent live in 2-person households and 25 percent live in 3- or 4- person households. About one quarter of respondents said they had children living with them.
Education: Thirty-eight percent of survey respondents hold a bachelor’s degree and 58 percent hold a graduate or professional degree. Four percent indicated that they had a high school diploma, some college but no degree or attended technical school.
Income: About half of survey respondents (48 percent) have household incomes over $150,000/year, and over two-thirds of Coop membership (68 percent) have a household income over $101,000/year. An equal number of Coop members have household incomes of $55,000 or less as those with incomes of $350,000 or higher (10 percent in each group).
For the full report, which contains greater detail about survey findings and discusses methodological caveats and survey limitations, please visit our committee’s website.