As Big Box Stores Close, Can Community-Led Grocery Stores Fill the Void?

Groups like Go Green in Englewood, 40 Acres in Austin and Southside Food Co-Op say it’s a long road, and they’ll need many more people and different solutions to truly repair the food system.  

By Jerrel Floyd

Go Green Community Fresh Market opened over a year ago in Englewood, and leaders say that it takes a lot of prep work and commitment to develop a sustainable grocery business. (Photo: Davon Clark/City Bureau)

Over the last year, several big box grocery stores have made their abrupt departures from Chicago's South and West Sides. The closing of  Aldi in West Garfield Park, Whole Foods in Englewood and three Walmart stores in predominantly Black neighborhoods has frustrated residents, with some local leaders arguing that corporate-chain grocery stores cannot be relied upon, especially in communities that face food apartheid.

But without the large grocery companies that many Chicagoans rely upon, what remains? In recent years, Black-owned, community-led efforts like Go Green Community Fresh Market, Forty Acres Fresh Market and the Southside Food Co-op have attempted to fill the gap. All are at different stages of development of permanent locations, and all have observed both how challenging it can be as well as why it's necessary and important.

From building industry knowledge from scratch, to raising funds to acquire goods and space and engaging with their surrounding communities, Black food entrepreneurs face significant hurdles. Tackling the issue of food access in these communities, they say, will be an enormous project that requires a whole lot more investment and many more people—not just a few leaders—as well as a different attitude from the big players in the industry.

Deep community engagement and outreach

Go Green Community Fresh Market is a spot of color and vibrancy at the corner of Racine and 63rd in Englewood. Slightly wider and larger than the average corner store, it’s a full-service grocer that was opened just over a year ago by Inner-City Muslim Action Network, a nonprofit that promotes health and wellness on the South Side. 

Alia J. Bilal, IMAN’s deputy executive director who helps to run the store, describes it as a welcoming space where customers are typically greeted by a community engagement coordinator and fresh produce.

She says grocery stores in general have to be established with and by the community. People who are living in neighborhoods on the South and West Sides should be able to decide what comes into a store, when it arrives and what it’s offering. “And that’s just something that is constantly missing from these large developments that are generally coming from outside entities with a big building downtown,” she says.

It took 25 years for Go Green's doors to officially open to the public, and around 14 of those years were spent connecting with corner stores as part of IMAN’s corner store campaign. Their team helped to address racial tensions between Arab corner store owners and Black residents, by helping owners better serve the needs of community members who rely on them as their primary access to food. Some adjustments included putting more healthy produce in the stores, reducing prices for those items, hiring locals and taking down bulletproof glass.

Every choice they’ve made in establishing Go Green is informed by the years of community engagement, research and results from their corner store campaign.

Bilal compares their process to the Whole Foods in Englewood that opened under the Rahm Emanuel mayoral administration in 2016. Though the community was informed about three years before the Whole Foods opened, this felt like a pretty quick turnaround to Bilal. Six years later, it closed.

"The groundwork to really build up both community buy-in, but also sustainability, it takes time," she says.

The good news is that any community engagement prior to opening can help with another major challenge for any retail store: marketing.

Grocery franchises have millions at their disposal for marketing, and still, in some cases, struggle to get the vital community buy-in to sustain the business. But smaller stores face the additional hurdle of unfamiliarity, since they can’t point to an existing franchise for reference.

Go Green organizers highlight their community engagement and safety coordinators for working to build relationships with customers and ensure it’s a safe place to shop.

"It doesn't have the militarized presence that one might expect you need," Bilal says.

Across the street from the market, IMAN has a food distribution space for residents who may need more financial support. They're also hoping to develop a “food security fund,” basically a private financial support tab that some customers can pull from to shop in the store without the stigma of SNAP, the federal program sometimes known as food stamps. 

"You're just shopping in a dignified way, like anybody else who comes to that store," Bilal says.

The engagement work is still ongoing, Bilal admits. During their recent promotional event celebrating the store’s first anniversary, people who lived just a few blocks away told staff it was their first time hearing about the market.

The people at Southside Food Co-op agree about the need for long-term engagement and outreach, though they are taking a different approach. Community involvement is at the center of its existence: Residents who join the co-op will be the collective owners of the grocery space when it's completed. 

"We need more visibility," says Rev. Bernadine Harvin, a Chatham resident who is board chair for the co-op, which currently has 140 members and is looking for more. "Visibility I think will give us the growth that we need as far as members coming on board and wanting to be a part of us."

The group is still in the early stages and hasn’t chosen a specific neighborhood yet for its eventual location, though they recently hired their own part-time community engagement coordinator. 

Industry knowledge

When it comes to the placement and development of grocery stores, "These things really have to have more of a short-, medium- and long-term strategy," says Mari Gallagher, a researcher often credited with popularizing the term "food desert" in the U.S. Her 2006 study revealed that around 650,000 Chicagoans did not have access to healthy food.

In other words, it’s hard for a grocery business to go from zero to fully functioning mega-store in a single step. Whether it’s a corner store campaign like IMAN’s work, or grocery pop-ups or food distributions, starting with a short-term project can be critical to long-term success.

Gallagher became interested in the topic when she participated in community garden efforts on the South Side as well as a Rogers Park grocery store development in the 1990s. At the time, people outside Rogers Park didn't think the neighborhood could sustain a grocery store, so her chamber of commerce group put together their own development team. That’s when she realized that compared to the big box stores, community groups don’t have access to the market and consumer research to understand what shoppers want, nor the resources to set up important systems like inventory, pricing, staffing, SNAP and more. Nowadays, she is an expert researcher and consultant that works with grocery store companies and entities like the city of Chicago who are interested in the food space and combating food apartheid.

Starting small and learning slowly can help, but there’s still a huge gap to bridge: Doing a food distribution is a challenge in itself, developing and sustaining a store is another.

"There's no way around doing the work," says Liz Abunaw, who is currently navigating commercial real estate development as she plans to open a West Side grocery store called Forty Acres Fresh Market. The organization currently hosts pop-up markets and runs a produce delivery subscription service.

She says unfortunately there isn't a strong Black network in the Chicago independent grocery arena, and the non-Black networks that already exist tend to be tight and built around a family business.

"But it doesn't mean that we can't get into those networks," Abunaw says. "It doesn't mean that we can't get into this industry and build our own network."

Many of the people she knows who are successful in the industry had to spend years learning the craft: How to develop a relationship with product vendors, the best systems for packaging and distributing those products, how to properly train employees are common questions. It's not something most people can pick up overnight if they want to be successful, she says.

And without that awareness, a lot of vital things can be overlooked. While larger grocery companies have blamed retail theft for their desire to pull out of a neighborhood, Abunaw says in her experience that simple mistakes, like employees who mistag items, are more common and costly. (More recently, a Walgreens executive admitted to overstating the impact of retail theft.)

"I've had it at my own markets, I'm like, the inventory isn't matching [because of employee erorr]," Abunaw says. "That stuff happens all the time."

Financial barriers

So community engagement and market research are important, but expensive—which is why all three Black grocery leaders cited funding as a key challenge. 

After a big box store closes in a neighborhood with limited food access, local residents are energized to open a new, independent grocery as soon as possible. But Liz Abunaw, founder of Forty Acres Fresh Market, says that first they need to find $500,000 for predevelopment.

People are often shocked it ends up taking that much, she says. "Then there's people who have gotten the money to either acquire a store or open a store, but they don't have the expertise," she adds. "And so then you're learning with all this overhead of a brick and mortar store."

Similar to Abunaw, Harvin says that whenever a nearby grocery store closes, people often push her to have the co-op purchase the vacated space. But funding remains a consistent barrier. They're hoping to raise more than $4 million to refit an existing space, but keep coming across barriers. For instance, Harvin tried to apply for the Chicago Neighborhood Opportunity Fund, but realized it would be difficult since the city prioritizes applicants who already have a building or a signed lease.

"It's so much that they require you to have already done before they even invest in you," she says.

Bilal explains anyone interested in starting something like an independent or community-led grocery store needs to understand it's a long game. That also goes for investors who don't always have that patience and understanding, she says.

Barriers to financing, difficulty in sourcing and pricing products and marketing are some key challenges for community-led grocery stores. At Go Green, signs highlight certain products and where they come from. (Photo: Davon Clark/City Bureau)

"It's a hard truth, and it's a truth that a lot of these folks that provide the kind of seed funding for ventures like this don't always want to hear," she says. Many of those funders have more expertise in projects in the for-profit sector versus those in the non-profit sector like Go Green. 

In Black neighborhoods where incomes are low due to decades of disinvestment and structural racism, the pressure to turn a profit can be even tougher, especially for small grocery stores that are already struggling to price their goods.

“Some of the competitive sourcing [for grocery products] that’s available to larger stores is not as available to smaller stores where our buying power is just less,” Bilal says about Go Green. 

On the other hand, because they're smaller, they can make more immediate adjustments to products offered in comparison to a larger big box store, she adds: “We’ve had to navigate how to make our prices as competitive as possible, how to make this store the go-to store for our residents.”

In general, the food retail industry doesn't have large profit margins and relies heavily on selling a lot of product, as City Bureau reported last year. It’s even harder to finance a locally owned grocery store, which can’t offset its costs with profits from wealthier chain locations. 

That challenge is amplified even more on the South and West sides. Retail attracts retail, Gallagher says, and in areas that don't have any competing grocery stores or a robust ecosystem of retail and business, these stores are sometimes building from scratch.

"In some of these areas that have suffered from persistent disinvestment, there's just unfortunately other work that needs to be done," she says. This includes making the case that these communities are financially viable while maintaining a pricing model that doesn’t exclude low-income residents, establishing connections with vendors and encouraging those vendors to deliver produce to areas where they don’t usually go. 

Being hopeful during the "long game"

In a thriving community, the closing of a grocery store isn't a devastating event: It's one missing option out of a handful. It's the difference between making a right or a left out of your apartment building for a quick grocery run.

But for much of the South and West Sides of Chicago, decades of disinvestment and predatory practices have taken their toll. "It is a system problem, and it’s going to take a system solution," says Bilal.

That means even if communities want to focus on opening their own grocery stores, there's also room for existing grocery stores to step up, connect with community members and not leave without significant warning, advocates say.

Jahmal Cole, the founder and CEO of My Block My Hood My City nonprofit and a Chatham resident who frequented one of the closing Walmarts, says “people feel like they were getting blamed” for the stores’ closures.

Abunaw says that larger companies should let residents know that the store is in danger of closing. It might give local residents a chance to rally around the store and find ways to work with the company to keep it open. If not, at the very least, local leaders could try to find a new retail option for the neighborhood. 

“What more than often happens is a store moves out and the property sits and sits and sits,” she says, remembering the Dominick’s in South Shore that closed in 2013 and remained vacant for years and the Save-A-Lot in Austin that closed in 2020. 

Advance notice of closing is the least these stores could do, Abunaw says. If the store has been open for 30 years, it’s unlikely it’d been losing money that whole time: “This community kept you afloat, this community made you profitable, this community made you money,” she says. “So then have the consideration to communicate with this community.” 

Those companies can also be more transparent and share data and information about what did and didn't work at that location, organizers suggest. That way community members can learn from it, especially in areas where there is virtually no competitive grocery retail market.  

Even that small gesture—which could help a community kickstart their own grocery solutions—could blunt the negative publicity in the wake of a store’s departure. 

Besides enforcing better corporate behavior from existing stores, local grocery leaders say they hope that community members will support and get involved in smaller efforts to repair food systems, even if they aren’t one-and-done solutions like a brand new grocery store. 

Southside Food Co-op was recently offered the small retail space at the front of the ChiFresh Kitchen, a worker co-op also based in Chatham. It’s not Southside Food's long-term goal but it’s something small to help with visibility and experience. The news is still pretty fresh but Harvin says they are hoping to potentially open a small market with the space. 

Harvin says it will give them a centralized space and a chance to start directly supporting their community. “When you’re writing grant [requests] you can say, ‘This is what I’m doing now, this is how we’re affecting our community now,’” she says. 

Cole’s My Block My Hood My City established a food distribution at the shuttered Chatham Walmart to more immediately support residents after the store's closure announcement. 

“You have to rapidly respond,” Cole says, noting that emergency efforts shouldn’t stop people from finding sustainable solutions. “You just gotta go react and if your compass is, ‘Are you really helping people?,’ I think it’s easier to make decisions.” 

Cole and his team are also hoping to acquire the closing training facility from Walmart and turn it into a space that reflects what the community wants. "They can turn this tragedy into an opportunity," he says. 

Ultimately, pinpointing the best solution is complicated because there isn’t really one superior option. Building a food ecosystem from scratch will take a lot of different actors, but to not do anything is simply not an option for most advocates. With year one closing out for Go Green, Bilal says there's a lot of relief in seeing the store opened, considering they all spent two decades working on it. 

“It’s given us a profound sense of accomplishment,” she says. “And of course, it’s an acknowledgment that [our community members] deserve so much more.”

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