People’s Grocery runs urban
agriculture classes for youth at
three organic gardens in the city,
and a curriculum that sends high
schoolers into classrooms to talk
about the dangers of fast food.
People’s Grocery runs urban
agriculture classes for youth at
three organic gardens in the city,
and a curriculum that sends high
schoolers into classrooms to talk
about the dangers of fast food.
It’s an early spring afternoon and all is quiet in front of the Missionary Baptist Church, a cinderblock parish on Oakland’s impoverished West Side. Then the Mobile Market pulls up. Painted a cheerful orange and purple and blasting hip-hop tunes from a pair of solar-powered speakers, the custom-designed delivery truck trails behind it a whiff of popcorn—the scent of a biodiesel engine. Within minutes, the truck’s back doors swing open to reveal a fully stocked grocery on wheels, with neat rows of fresh produce, shelves of organic dry goods, bins of grains and nuts.
It doesn’t take long for the Mobile Market to attract attention. A neighbor walks up with his 7-year-old daughter, high-fives the Market’s driver, Brahm Ahmadi, and begins chatting as he picks out organic peanut butter and juice. A young man wearing a knee-length Harlem Globetrotters jersey strolls by and peaks inside. “Is this the People’s Grocery?” he asks. “This is hella tight.”
He’s right. With its graffiti lettering — “Fresh Produce! Affordable Prices” — and bumpin’ soundtrack, the 2-year-old Mobile Market is generating a lot of excitement for its innovative way of bringing natural foods to families in West Oakland. A community of 32,000 people where 70 percent of households live below the poverty line, West Oakland has dozens of liquor stores, but only one supermarket. The People’s Grocery, a young nonprofit group, is determined to change that.
Started two years ago by a pair of twenty-something activists-turned social entrepreneurs, People’s Grocery is pioneering a model to provide healthy foods to low-income communities at prices they can afford. It’s not that the people of West Oakland don’t want to eat well, insist the folks at People’s Grocery, it’s that nutritious foods are simply not available in their community.
Biodiesel Mobile Market
“The majority of people in West Oakland would prefer to eat natural foods — that’s what they were raised on: that’s what was normal,” says Malaika Edwards, one of the co-founders of People’s Grocery. The problem, she explains, is that “the prices are high. What we’re doing is providing access to healthy and affordable food.”
“I spent a lot of years being an activist, trying to stop things from happening,” Edwards recently told the San Francisco Chronicle.” This gives me an opportunity to build the world I want to see. The results are very tangible: to see kids try a piece of fruit for the first time gives me hope.”
Earnest and determined — but equipped with an easy smile and quiet charisma — Edwards recounts some People’s Grocery history. In 2003, she and co-founder Brahm Ahmadi — both former staffers of the youth-oriented environmental group YES! — launched People’s Grocery with a program called “Collards and Commerce.” Eight West Oakland teenagers spent a summer learning the basics of nutrition, business development, cooking, and organic gardening. During the course of the program, the participants decided that what their community desperately needed was an organic grocery. Creating a whole new brick-and-mortar store was out of the question, so the group started the Mobile Market as an interim step. Today, People’s Grocery runs urban agriculture classes for youth at three organic gardens in the city, and supports a peer-to-peer program that sends high schoolers into classrooms to talk with other students about the dangers of fast food and the importance of nutrition.
With its edgy combination of street sensibility and social justice, the Mobile Market has become something of a media darling. But buzz and business success are two different things, as a recent Tuesday afternoon with the Mobile Market demonstrated.
At the first stop, McClymonds High School, only a handful of the hundreds of students flooding out of classes stop to buy something. At the second stop — the Missionary Baptist Church — curiosity translates into just one paying customer.
The People’s Grocery founders acknowledge that economic sustainability is their most pressing challenge. Foundation support makes up about 70 percent of the organization’s $200,000 budget, which leaves Mobile Market struggling to turn a profit. People’s Grocery is grappling with two important tests: improving marketing and outreach to the West Oakland community and encouraging the organic industry to reach beyond the largely white customers on whom it has based its current success.
Inner City Organics
“If you see a face on these [packages of organic] products, it’s basically a white face,” says co-founder Brahm Ahmadi, an energetic 29-year-old who manages to keep an eye on the store even as his gaze drifts to the middle-distance of his bigger visions. “The organic companies have mono-cultured themselves into a niche segment. We are trying to remind the pioneers of the organic food movement, many of whom got started in the sixties, of their original mission.”
With his baggy jeans, hooded sweatshirt, and hoop earrings, Ahmadi doesn’t quite fit the picture of your typical MBA. But after several years of business school — begun, he says, when it became apparent that People’s Grocery needed more economic acumen — Ahmadi has the lingo down pat, and terms like “price point” and “strategic marketing” spill out of his mouth.
The real danger, as Ahmadi sees it, is that two parallel food systems have emerged. While the affluent and upwardly mobile have access to healthy groceries, poorer communities are condemned to grow fat on diets of cheap, unhealthy foods. The rich have the luxury of choosing low-fat, farm-fresh cuisine; the poor must struggle to find nutritious foods. The difference helps explain why an obesity epidemic is sweeping across America and causing a deadly spike in heart disease and diabetes among the nation’s poor.
A solution, according to Ahmadi, is for the organic and health food companies to recognize that they need to reach poor communities if they are to grow beyond their current tiny market share. Taking organics to lower-income communities is not only an ecological and social necessity, but also an economic one.
“The idea is to leverage the success of the organic industry so that it benefits low-income communities,” Ahmadi says. “Organic is basically a niche market for the rich. As a corporate endeavor, they have to look for increased growth and they have to find emerging markets. We’re making the case for low-income communities to be those emerging markets.”
On the Mobile Market’s third stop of the afternoon, it becomes apparent that the model Ahamdi is talking about has real potential. Suddenly, the van is hopping with customers. A longtime People’s Grocery member, daughter in tow, is busy buying lettuce and soymilk as a new client stocks up on fresh bread and organic soups. (Membership is free and restricted to West Oakland residents who get a 25 percent discount on packaged and bulk foods.)
“Without [the People’s Grocery], you can’t get organic produce,” says Nyeema Brown, after signing up to become a member. “That’s why it’s so important that we have them. I don’t want to be a guinea pig for all the pesticides they’re putting in our food. I can’t always buy organic, but I try to as much as I can.”
People’s Grocery employee Cindy Villanueva, 20, says that community awareness about the importance of organic foods is growing.
“When I first started working here, I used to eat a lot of fast food,” says Villanueva, who began working at People’s Grocery after graduating from McClymonds High. “But then I opened my eyes to how bad it was for myself. I try to eat, you know, fruits and vegetables. And I try to tell my friends about it. At first they were, like, ‘What are you talking about?’ But now they’ve started to listen. They support what I’m doing.”
Jason Mark is the co-author, with Kevin Danaher, of Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power. He is researching a book about the future of food.