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    Rainbow Grocery Timeline

    Rainbow Grocery’s 16th Street location

    This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Rainbow Grocery Cooperative. Here are some noteworthy years for Rainbow over the past five decades:

    August 1975 – The first Rainbow Grocery store was opened at 16th and Valencia: 3159 16th Street in the Mission.

    1976 – Rainbow filed ownership status as a nonprofit corporation.

    1981 – Rainbow dropped out of the People’s Food System—a network of worker-owned cooperative stores and other businesses—but the People’s Cooperating Warehouse allowed Rainbow to shop without a vote.

    1983 – Rainbow, thanks to $250,000 in loans from customers, moved to a bigger location on the corner of 15th and Mission streets.

    1984 – Rainbow’s sales went up by 68% in the first year at the new location.

    1985 – Workers at Rainbow obtained group health insurance.

    Rainbow Grocery was one of the first businesses in San Francisco to install
    solar panels. (2002)

    1988 – Rainbow received massive publicity from a front-page article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. (The paper shut down in 2014, but partially relaunched online in 2016.)

    1993 – Rainbow incorporated its status as a Worker-Owned Cooperative.

    1996 – Rainbow moved to its much larger, current location on Folsom Street, buying the building and securing an over one-million-dollar loan from the First National Bank backed by the city government.

    1997 – Rainbow’s sales jumped again, 55% in one year following the move and bringing in over 100 new workers.

    Rainbow Grocery team members in front of the 13th Street entrance

    2002 – Rainbow workers designed the Green Energy Devise by installing daylight harvesting, solar electric and solar thermal panels.

    2014 – Rainbow became a certified San Francisco Green Business.

    2021 – The city honored Rainbow as an official Legacy Business.

    2025 – Rainbow installed a new mural from Afro-Futurist artist Paul Lewin, dedicated to the cooperative’s longtime co-worker Fredi D’Aguilar.

    The Co-op received a Certificate of Honor for its 50th Anniversary from Supervisor Jackie Fielder.

    Rainbow celebrates 50 years of being in business!

    (The San Francisco Bay Times thanks Rainbow’s Jenny Feng and Gordon Edgar for their help in creating this timeline.)

    Mural by Afro-Futurist artist Paul Lewin (2025)

    Rainbow Grocery at 50
    Published on August 14, 2025