Barcelona's first cooperative supermarket put its future to a vote. With hybrid voting on Vocdoni, members voted on paper in the room or online from home: 115 votes, 12.6% of the membership, and an anonymous, verifiable result.
Ferran
· 6 min read
FoodcoopBCN is the first cooperative, participatory and non-profit supermarket in Barcelona. It belongs to its members, and its most important decisions are taken by all of them in the general assembly.
On September 21, 2026, FoodcoopBCN held one of the most important assemblies in its history: a vote to decide the future of the cooperative. The Consell Rector, the cooperative's governing board, was clear that a decision of this size needed as many voices as possible. So they ran a hybrid general assembly with Vocdoni: members in the room voted on paper, and members at home followed the assembly by livestream and voted online.
The result: 115 votes, 12.6% of the membership, and a decision the whole cooperative could stand behind.
FoodcoopBCN started in 2018 to bring the participatory supermarket model to Barcelona, inspired by Park Slope Food Coop in New York. Its shop opened in 2022.
The model is simple: the members own the supermarket. Consumer members contribute a few hours a month to running the shop, and every member has a voice and a vote in the assembly, where the big decisions are made.
When the question on the table is the future of the cooperative itself, the result has to be beyond doubt. That means two things: a process members can trust, and enough participation for the result to represent the membership.
An assembly held only in person makes the second part hard. Members have jobs, children, care duties and lives that don't always fit an evening in a meeting room. Some live in other parts of the city or outside it. In a cooperative with hundreds of members, an in-person-only assembly leaves out most of them by default.
The Consell Rector wanted every member to be able to take part, wherever they were. They needed:
In the room: members attending the assembly at the cooperative voted on paper.
At home: members who could not attend followed the assembly by livestream. When the time came to vote, they opened the voting link, identified themselves as members and cast their vote from their phone or computer. No app to download and no account to create.
The online vote: each online ballot was anonymous, because each member's identification and their vote were kept separate and could not be linked. Ballots also stayed encrypted until the vote closed, so no partial results could influence anyone still deciding. When voting closed, the online votes were tallied automatically and added to the paper count.
FoodcoopBCN did not need an IT department or an external provider to run the assembly. The cooperative's own team used the Vocdoni App for every step:
For hybrid assemblies, the Vocdoni App also lets administrators update the census while a vote is live. FoodcoopBCN used it on assembly day to remove online voting access from the members who turned up in person, so each of them could only vote once, on paper.
"Many FoodcoopBCN members can't always make it to the assembly, because of work, care duties or because they live far away. With hybrid voting, 30 members followed the assembly by livestream and voted securely from home. Those are voices an in-person-only assembly would have left out."
- Gerard Palou, member of the Consell Rector of FoodcoopBCN
Those 30 online votes are more than a quarter of the total, and a 35% increase on the votes cast in the room. They came from members who could not be in the room, and who an in-person-only assembly would have left out.
The experience was positive and simple, for the members voting from home and for the team running the assembly. And the cooperative got what it was looking for: a decision with more participation and more legitimacy, reached through a process that is secure, verifiable and anonymous.
Consumer cooperatives are built on one principle: one member, one vote. As they grow, keeping that principle real gets harder.
A cooperative with hundreds or thousands of members cannot fit them all in one room, and the larger the territory its members live in, the fewer of them can attend in person. Members spread across a city, a region or a country face travel time and costs. Members with jobs, shifts or care duties often can't attend at all. The result is an assembly where the decisions are taken by the few who could be there, not by the membership.
Online and hybrid voting change that:
This applies to food cooperatives like FoodcoopBCN, and also to energy, housing, consumer and credit cooperatives, where memberships run into the thousands. It is the same approach that Plataforma per la Llengua uses to give its members across four states an equal vote, the one COIB used to run its hybrid annual general meeting, and the one FC Barcelona's supporters' clubs used to elect their advisory council.
If your cooperative runs general assemblies, board elections or member consultations, see how Vocdoni works as online voting software for cooperatives.
FoodcoopBCN's general assembly shows what hybrid voting looks like for a cooperative:
If your cooperative needs to take a decision to its members, our team can help you design the vote. You can also start free and set up your first vote in minutes. No credit card required.
FC Barcelona ran the election of the advisory council that represents its 1,160 supporters' clubs online with Vocdoni. Penya presidents voted from any device with a one-time SMS code and an anonymous vote, and 84% of the penyes called to vote took part.
Ferran
6 min read
In four days, more than 60,000 teachers in Catalonia cast their vote on whether to endorse the preliminary agreement with Catalonia's Department of Education. Three different unions ran the consultation together with Vocdoni, a voting technology that is secure, verifiable and secret by design.
Ferran
6 min read
Belarus’ 2026 Coordination Council election faced 24 billion malicious requests and 68TB of attack traffic. Despite sustained cyberattacks, Vocdoni and Society22 kept the election online, verifiable, and censorship-resistant, enabling 2,113 participants to vote securely.
Ferran, Jordi Pinyana
11 min read