Marquitrice Mangham never imagined that she’d open a grocery store in her hometown of Webb, Mississippi.
She left in the 1990s after high school. But in 2016, she inherited her family’s farm, splitting her time between the majority-Black town of fewer than 500 people in the rural Delta and her current home in Atlanta.
Webb had changed considerably and was regressing, she said. Businesses had closed, and the housing situation got worse — but the food desert still had a Dollar General. Like many counties across the Delta region, Tallahatchie County, where Webb is, is situated in a food desert. Though the town has had the Dollar General since 2009, it only provided frozen and processed foods. Here, the residents never had a grocery store, forcing many to travel more than 20 miles to the nearest one.
Mangham, a military veteran and planning expert, saw a solution. In October 2022, she opened Farmacy Marketplace, a 2,500-square-foot neighborhood grocery store that sells fresh foods and meats sourced mostly from local farmers. Instead of the traditional for-profit store, she used a different model: her nonprofit, In Her Shoes, works at the intersection of farming and food access.
Mangham is one of many Black entrepreneurs nationwide working to improve health outcomes and food accessibility in rural communities or Black neighborhoods. And as hundreds of dollar stores are closing, more Black entrepreneurs are opening grocery stores anyway — whether it’s Neighborhood Grocery in Detroit, All-In Grocers in Waterloo, Iowa, or Sherman Park Grocery in Milwaukee.
Research shows that when dollar stores show up in communities — particularly areas that are low-income, rural, and Black — it results in grocery store closure, job loss, and declining sales. From 2000 to 2019, grocery stores experienced a nearly 6% decrease in sales, 4% decline in employment and 2% increase in grocery stores closing. The outcomes are three times larger in rural areas than urban areas, according to new research released by the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. These negative impacts waned after five years in urban areas. In rural areas, however, the effects continued.
Read More: The Movement to Stop Dollar Stores from Suffocating Black Communities
Back in Webb, only a few weeks before Farmacy opened its doors, the Dollar General caught fire and closed down, which served as an opportunity for Mangham to offer household items in the store, too. The dollar store has since reopened.
Opening a grocery store isn’t the only, or best, solution to address the root causes of food insecurity, she said. Affordability, transportation, and lack of education create additional barriers to healthy lifestyles. Mangham is looking to do more: drive a mobile produce truck to other towns and provide financial incentives to encourage families to buy more fruits and vegetables, through programs such as Double Up Food Bucks. It allows people who receive SNAP benefits to earn up to $20 a day when they buy fruits and vegetables.
But what does it really take to open a local grocery store?
Capital B wanted to understand more about the challenges, the benefits beyond Mangham’s community, and her plans for the future. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Capital B: Why a grocery store? How did you get into this work?
Marquitrice Mangham: There was only one grocery store in the whole county, and that was 15 to 17 miles away from most residents in the county, and some even farther. In Her Shoes, we work closely with farmers and help them to grow their business or at least sustain their business over time. One of the biggest ways to help them is to access markets. We work with farmers who are growing but not able to reach those populations that need it … because the populations are sparsely populated, everything is stretched out over 600 square miles. They’re throwing their hard-earned food away because it’s rotting, meeting its shelf life prior to them actually being able to sell it or reach people who want to buy it. The grocery store was the answer to a number of things.
Why a nonprofit model?
We decided to do it under the In Her Shoes Inc. umbrella or do it as a part of our nonprofit because over time, we felt that it would be more sustainable. There are a lot of resources out there to help address food access. There’s a lot of resources out there to help farmers, so we felt by doing it as a nonprofit, if the sales were short or [there were] issues with trying to maintain over time, there were other programs or resources that would help us to be able to sustain the store longer. Fortunately for us, we’ve been able to sustain ourselves even though there is a dollar store in the community.
What are some of the challenges or startup costs you’ve experienced since opening?
We bought the brick-and-mortar store a year or so prior. We applied for a grant to buy the equipment to do some renovations and upgrades to the mechanicals. It took us maybe four or five months to make the renovations and upgrades.
Most of these wholesale vendors require you to order a minimum amount each week, and if you’re not selling it you can’t buy it — having to order $10,000 or $20,000 a week just to maintain your vendor. That alone would shut down a lot of smaller community grocery stores. Just the overhead outside of that is fairly steep when you’re talking about refrigeration and coolers, electricity and other things. So the price tag not only starts up, but the ongoing or monthly price can get pretty extensive. You’re looking at your small, independent store, so you’re not getting your products at the price that a chain retailer gets.
Not only are you having to buy more, but you’re having to sell at a higher price because you don’t get the discounts. You don’t have the amount of sales volume that the Family Dollar or the Dollar Generals have, and they’re buying in bulk for hundreds of stores at a time. There are a lot of challenges that we saw in the beginning.
As far as variety, we have a national wholesale distributor, and we partner with them. They helped us out a lot with relaxing some of their standards to be able to allow us to partner with them and supply our grocery store. For us, the best outlet was to basically open under the nonprofit and do it as economically as possible.
What should people take into account before going on this journey? Are there alternatives to a grocery store?
After opening Farmacy Marketplace, I’m getting quite a few requests from other local governments and other entities to help build a grocery store in their community. I’m doing the research to see if it’s doable, and if it’s economically feasible over time. Every community is just not able to support a standalone grocery store over time, not as a business. It may be more sustainable as a nonprofit.
Most elderly people, most people, are going to go to the local pharmacy. You could partner with a local pharmacist to offer a food display for fresh fruits and vegetables. That’s one of the reasons why we’re called Farmacy Marketplace because it’s good, healthy food options that promote good health. Rather than building a brick-and-mortar building, look at those retailers that people visit that are already in place that you may be able to partner with.
We looked at gas stations and other stores that are existing that we may be able to partner with and make some upgrades to their electrical and plumbing to offer what I call fresh food kiosks, and in those outlets they already have the consumers that are visiting out of necessity or easy access. Why not put a refrigerated display case with fresh fruits and vegetables and some meat options?
Try and address the issue with what’s there, meet people where they are, and build up to that. The idea isn’t to just have a brick-and-mortar. The idea isn’t to just build a grocery store. The idea or the hope is to provide fresh food access in whatever form that might be.
