Amy Stevens, who lives in a town of fewer than 3,000 people in central Georgia, has to drive thirty minutes to buy fresh food. “It is shocking that we are surrounded by food growers, but we have to travel to get that food,” she told 13WMAZ last September.
Melissa Kaemingk’s trip from her home in Maple Falls, Washington, to the nearest grocery store with fresh food isn’t short, either. A one-way trip to buy nutritious food, she told the Cascadia Daily News in January, is twenty-seven miles—at least a twenty-five minute drive each way.
Both of these women live in food deserts, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines as either urban areas where more than a third of the population lives more than one mile away from the nearest grocery store, or rural areas where the same proportion of the population lives more than ten miles away. According to the latest USDA report, 17.4 percent of U.S. citizens live in food deserts.
Inconvenient transportation distances are not the only challenge for residents of food deserts. For those whose most readily accessible food options are highly processed foods such as fast food, obesity and diabetes rates are higher, while life expectancy is lower.
“The impact of not having access to fresh, healthy food in their lives has an impact on their health and, in turn, has an impact on the vitality of that community, including the economic activity,” Jose Luis Rojas, chief lending officer of the Local Enterprise Assistance Fund (LEAF) tells The Progressive. LEAF is a nonprofit that finances organizations that embrace shared ownership, such as food, housing, and worker co-ops.
For many advocates, public grocery stores—which are intended to provide a service to the public, rather than solely to make a profit—are seen as an increasingly viable option to combat food deserts in low-income communities, as well as price gouging by private grocery chains in higher income neighborhoods. These stores can be owned and operated by a variety of entities, including the government, nonprofit organizations, public-private partnerships, or cooperatives made up of consumers.
“Public options are part of the fabric of this country,” Margaret Mullins, director of policy options and government for the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, tells The Progressive.
They expand freedom and opportunity and give people access to services they might not be able to get or afford.
In Illinois, the passage of the Illinois Grocery Initiative in 2023 has placed the state on the cutting edge of grocery store public policy. The law allocates $20 million in grants, technical assistance, and equipment upgrades to grocery stores that open new stores in food deserts, including public grocery stores. What’s more, in May, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker announced $10 million in funding awards to support construction and renovation costs for new stores in four food desert communities, as well as first-year operations costs such as employee wages, utility costs, and initial food inventory.
One of the award recipients is a municipally-owned store in Venice, Illinois, a downstate majority-Black city of roughly 1,500 residents who currently drive miles to buy fresh food, having not had access to a local grocery store in decades.
“It’s been great,” Erion Benjamin Malasi, the Illinois policy and advocacy director for the Economic Security Project, tells The Progressive, referring to the law’s early track record.
It really jump-started interest and feasibility studies and conversations with local officials across the state.
Mullins agrees. “Each of the projects will bring needed relief to [Illinois] communities and they will also contribute important information to others on how they can implement similar projects,” she says.
Other cities across the country are beginning to explore the possibility of investing in publicly owned grocery stores, as well. In 2024, a public-private partnership in Atlanta, Georgia, opened a free public grocery store for Atlanta Public Schools students and their families, while Madison, Wisconsin, is set to open a nonprofit grocery store this fall. And while Illinois’s initiative to build new grocery stores focuses primarily on low-income communities in food deserts, there are signs that the concept is starting to go more mainstream, with consumers in more affluent neighborhoods affected by inflated grocery prices at private stores appearing increasingly receptive to the idea.
A 2021 investigation by The Guardian and Food and Water Watch found that across dozens of essential grocery items, nearly 80 percent of product was supplied by only a handful of companies. The study also found that higher market concentration and less competition led to higher prices for consumers, at a time when grocery prices are the source of increasing financial anxiety for many—and were shown by polls to be a decisive factor in Trump’s 2024 election victory.
If the upcoming Democratic primary election for New York City mayor is any indication, a push for public grocery stores may be on the verge of much greater visibility nationwide. Zohran Mamdani, a New York State Assemblyman currently polling second on average in the race behind former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, has touted public grocery stores in his policy platform. Where the Illinois Grocery Initiative only provides public funding to lower-income communities without any existing grocery stores, Mamdani’s proposal would provide funding for municipally-owned stores in all five boroughs, regardless of whether a neighborhood currently has a grocery store.
“As Mayor of New York City, I will establish a network of city-owned grocery stores,” Mamdani said in a campaign video posted to his social media in December.
We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores, whose mission is lower prices, not price gouging.
The fact that public grocery stores are not for-profit institutions, Malasi says, is a major selling point. “First, we are trying to remove profit from the equation,” he says. “Second, without that profit drive, a municipal grocery store can compete on prices by wholesaling food.” Since government-operated grocery stores don’t have to pay rent or property taxes, they can pass on those additional savings to consumers.
But public grocery stores are not immune from changing consumer demand and the challenge of maintaining a viable business. In August 2024, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica examined twenty-four stores that received start-up funding from the federal government in 2020 and 2021. As of June 2024, five of those stores had closed due to their inability to compete with the discounted prices offered by private chains and limited access to capital.
However, Malasi asserts that a network of public grocery stores sharing resources would be in a stronger position to sustain long-term growth and weather downturns than any individual store alone. Both Mullins and Malasi believe that enforcing the federal Robinson-Patman Act—which forbids price discrimination tactics such as large suppliers giving bulk price discounts to large corporations—would make public grocery stores competitive with private chains.
According to Rojas, the most impactful public grocery stores “are the ones that are able to have a wider array of customers, including lower-income people. To attract them you have to access programs like SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] and WIC [Women Infants Children] and getting better prices as well.”
And while critics are put off by the fact that public grocery stores often require taxpayers’ subsidies to continue operations, Malasi points out that taxpayers already heavily subsidize private grocery chains through generous tax abatements. The results of this arrangement are far from ideal; as an example, Malasi cites Chicago’s investment of more than $10 million to bring a Whole Foods to Englewood, a food desert on its South Side, in 2016. “And Whole Foods promptly left after just six years,” he says.
Advocates cite public grocery stores as filling the same niche as public libraries, public fire departments, and publicly owned utilities. “The goal of the public option is to provide a good option for a community need when the private sector won’t,” says Mullins.
Glenn Daigon is a Washington, D.C.-based reporter. He has worked in the labor movement for over twenty-four years as an opposition researcher and is a graduate of Oberlin College. Glenn’s writings specialize in ongoing social issues.