Central Ohio UFCW Unions and Retail Employers Pension Plan

Central Ohio UFCW Unions and Retail Employers Pension Plan

The Central Ohio UFCW Unions and Retail Employers Pension Plan was established in 1967 as a defined-benefit arrangement for members of United Food and Commercial Workers locals and employees of contributing retail employers. The plan is jointly governed by labor trustees appointed by the UFCW and company trustees representing major contributing employers — a Taft-Hartley structure common to multiemployer plans in grocery, retail, and food processing. Kroger and CVS Health anchor the employer side, providing both contributions and board-level oversight through designated Company Trustees. On the investment side, the plan operates at the smaller end of the institutional spectrum with an estimated $54M in assets, which shapes a deliberately concentrated portfolio rather than the sprawling allocation maps of public mega-funds. Asset classes include commercial core real estate holdings in North America, an industrial data center portfolio, and niche private credit instruments such as Community Choice Financial Inc. PIK notes. The fund also participates in secondaries transactions — a deployment channel that allows a small plan to access seasoned private-market exposures without committing to long-duration blind-pool draws. Geographic focus is domestic, with real estate and credit positions concentrated in the United States. The board operates through a trustee structure with named fiduciaries from both labor and management. Mike Nichols serves as Labor Trustee representing UFCW Local 1059, while Thomas Guz holds a Company Trustee seat on behalf of CVS Health. The plan participates in industry initiatives through the National Association of Investment Companies (NAIC), which tracks diverse-managed fund commitments — a signal that the plan considers manager diversity as one factor in its selection process. No recent operational events or strategy shifts were publicly reported in the last 24 months given the plan's low public profile. The genuine structural differentiator for this plan is its governance model: a fully joint labor-management board with zero external delegation to an outsourced CIO or OCIO provider, based on available public record. At $54M, that is rare — most plans of this size have ceded investment discretion to a third-party consultant or pooled trust. Retaining direct fiduciary control implies a board-level conviction about cost management and a willingness to operate lean, which is the defining feature of how this fund is built.