United Food & Commercial Workers Heartland, Local #75

United Food & Commercial Workers Heartland, Local #75

UFCW Local 75 is a labor organization headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, that represents workers across grocery, meatpacking, food processing, and healthcare in western Ohio and portions of Indiana. The local is an affiliate of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and maintains close ties to the AFL-CIO and the Cincinnati AFL-CIO Labor Council. Its leadership team includes President Kevin Garvey and Secretary-Treasurer Bryon O'Neal, who are responsible for administering the union's collective bargaining agreements and overseeing the affiliated benefit plans. Like many union-negotiated plans, UFCW Local 75's pension fund is structured as a jointly trusteed Taft-Hartley plan. Contributions from participating employers — which include major grocery and food-processing companies such as The Kroger Co. and Campbell Soup Company — flow into the fund under multi-year collective bargaining agreements. The fund's investment strategy typically spans core fixed-income allocations, public equities, and a growing interest in real assets and private credit, consistent with the liability-driven mandates common across multi-employer union plans in the United States. While the fund does not publicly report detailed positions, peer UFCW-affiliated plans have historically allocated to infrastructure, real estate, and alternative credit strategies through outside consultants and fund-of-funds vehicles to match long-duration benefit obligations. The pension is anchored by employer contributions mandated through contracts covering workers in retail supermarkets, food manufacturing plants, and healthcare facilities. Its geographic concentration mirrors the union's membership footprint: southwestern Ohio, with some exposure to neighboring states. The local also operates a parallel philanthropic structure — the UFCW Local 75 Foundation and the UFCW Charity Foundation — which provide hardship assistance and scholarship support to members and their families. The union itself owns a commercial office at 7250 Poe Avenue in Dayton, along with minor operational assets such as a 1994 Ford E-350 truck and union merchandise inventory. What distinguishes UFCW Local 75's pension architecture is its joint-trustee model, which embeds employer fiduciary participation directly into the investment governance process. Rather than a single sponsor controlling allocation decisions, the fund's board is split evenly between union-appointed and employer-appointed trustees, creating a negotiated — and sometimes adversarial — oversight dynamic. This structure demands investment portfolios that are transparent, contractually grounded, and defensible to both labor and management stakeholders, making the fund a case study in how fiduciary process adapts when the capital source is a bargaining table rather than a family office balance sheet.