At the Corner Store, Chips, Soda—and Kale?

A new effort to shake up the convenience store formula in southwest Atlanta.

By Erin Crews

Robert Harris’s three-and-a-half-mile trip to the nearest supermarket can go one of two ways. Sometimes he takes MARTA down Metropolitan Parkway past long stretches of asphalt and boarded-up bungalows, getting off 21 stops later at the Kroger off Cleveland Avenue. The ride from his home in Capitol View Manor takes 25 minutes if the buses are running on time, maybe 45 minutes if they aren’t.

When it’s raining or he’s in a hurry, he pays a friend or neighbor $20 to drive him there, or to the East Point Wal-Mart. It’s not an insignificant sum for the 66-year-old Harris, who’s on disability, or for anyone receiving food stamp benefits, which come out to an average of $32.45 a week in Georgia.

“I try to do one or two big monthly trips to the grocery store, but when you’ve got kids eating you out of house and home, the breakfast foods tend to go quickly,” said Harris, who with his wife DeeDee has a 13-year-old and 10-year-old to feed.

Still, he prefers the trek to Kroger or Wal-Mart to the convenience stores that line Metropolitan Parkway. He occasionally buys beer at a local package store, but says the corner stores are often out of pantry staples and don’t carry enough fresh food.

“I’d go to the convenience stores if they made certain changes,” he said. “If they had larger volumes of things like milk, eggs, cheese, bread. If I didn’t have to worry about the expiration dates. I’d rather spend money at a local store and keep that money in the neighborhood.”

The only option

Adrianne Proeller, president of Capitol View Manor's neighborhood association

For many residents of of southwest Atlanta’s Capitol View Manor, a part of town known for its view of the Gold Dome but largely neglected by developers, those corner stores are the only viable option. Median household income in the neighborhood is just over $24,000, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data released in 2014, and nearly 40 percent of families don’t own a car.

“With so many people not having a car, it makes the corner stores a primary place to get groceries,” said Adrianne Proeller, president of Capitol View Manor’s neighborhood association and a community health worker at Morehouse School of Medicine. “I am very lucky to have a car. For my neighbors, going to the grocery store is a much more difficult task, trying to carry groceries back and forth.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture refers to neighborhoods like Capitol View Manor as food deserts, areas where the poverty rate is above 20 percent and at least a third of residents live a mile or more away from a supermarket. In Atlanta—the capital of a state with a $72 billion agriculture industry—and its surrounding counties, hundreds of thousands of people live in food deserts.

The vanishing small grocer

It wasn’t always this way. In the 1950s and ’60s, before the Downtown Connector carved through Sweet Auburn, intown residents could walk to well-stocked mom-and-pop shops. But the metro area’s ensuing sprawl, coupled with white flight from many downtown communities, left neighborhoods such as Capitol View Manor more sparsely populated. Small grocers gave way to today’s convenience stores, half of which carry no fruits or vegetables, according to a 2013 study of the local food systems in two southwest Atlanta neighborhoods by Ryan Barrett, then a Georgia State graduate student.

“If you can’t access healthy foods, and the foods you can access are overwhelmingly of poor quality or low nutritional value—so, sugar-sweetened beverages or fast food—those are things that really shape the decisions you’re going to make in the moment you’re hungry,” said Rodney Lyn, associate dean for academic affairs and associate professor in Georgia State’s School of Public Health.

Rodney Lyn, associate dean for academic affairs in the School of Public Health

Those decisions have serious, even deadly, health consequences. People who live in neighborhoods without supermarkets are at significantly higher risk of developing diabetes and heart disease. It might seem counterintuitive, but children growing up in food deserts tend to be both malnourished and overweight. Purchases made at convenience stores are a major contributor to their daily energy intake—on average, kids spend $1.07 per purchase at corner stores for one or two items containing a total of 357 calories. (There are 95 calories in an apple.)

Lyn sees the problem as a combination of policy decisions and environmental forces: poor city design, inadequate public transit, racial disparities, entrenched poverty. In zip code 30310, which covers a large swath of southwest Atlanta, including the Capitol View Manor, West End and Pittsburgh neighborhoods, 90 percent of residents are black and half of children live in households below the federal poverty rate.

“When you start to stack these barriers on top of one another, you see that it can be very difficult for consumers in food deserts—which are often minority, lower-income communities—to make healthy choices,” he said.

There’s no replacement for a supermarket where you can restock your pantry and pick up ingredients for dinner after work, and bringing major retailers into these neighborhoods is the ultimate goal, he acknowledged.

“But there’s the question of, does the community want and can the community support a full-service grocery store?” said Lyn, who thinks developers need to study more closely what type of retail approach is appropriate for these urban communities, pointing to the success of the Vine City Wal-Mart. “It’s not a Wal-Mart you would find in Alpharetta,” he said of the store, which opened in 2013. “It doesn’t have a garden section, it doesn’t sell patio furniture. It’s 75,000 square feet instead of 200,000 square feet. But it’s working.”

Wal-Mart’s Vine City location might provide a model for tailoring big-box stores for lower-income urban communities, but recruiting retailers like Kroger and Publix, who’ve struggled in some southwest Atlanta neighborhoods in the past, could take years or decades.

“But in the shorter term, one of the things we know is there are a lot of unhealthy options in the community, and a lot of people are consuming foods from convenience stores,” Lyn said.

So that’s where he started.

The Philadelphia model

Last April, Lyn boarded a flight to Philadelphia with Mary Anne Adams and Margaret Hooker, who work in the School of Public Health’s Center of Excellence on Health Disparities Research. Lyn had just received a $400,000 grant from the CDC’s Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Health (REACH) program to implement a Healthy Corner Stores Initiative in partnership with Morehouse School of Medicine’s Prevention Research Center, modeled after a successful project in Philadelphia that encouraged store owners to carry healthier options. The trio visited the city’s health department, went out to stores and met with The Food Trust, the Philadelphia-based nonprofit that funded the project there.

“What we learned is the initiative in Philadelphia is focused on corner stores because they actually have corner stores,” Lyn said. “These are literally stores on the corner, and they don’t sell gas. You’d be amazed at how small they are, but the variety and diversity of goods they provide.”

Atlanta has different challenges partly because its convenience stores serve a different purpose, said Hooker, a community services specialist working with Adams to manage the day-to-day operations of the project.

“The stores here are truly convenience stores versus being almost a small-scale grocery store in Philadelphia,” Hooker said. “They have a very dense population surrounding those stores, and they carry almost everything, soup to nuts. That really struck me. I had never really seen that up close.”

In Atlanta, she pointed out, the top-selling items at corner stores are chips, candy, soda, cigarettes and lottery tickets.

If you build it, will they come?

Mary Anne Adams, director of community engagement at the Center of Excellence on Health Disparities Research

A decade ago, when Adams first came to Atlanta from Mississippi to conduct street-based HIV/AIDS research, she found many participants weren’t getting sufficient food.

“We had to assist them however we could just so they could take our surveys,” said Adams, now director of community engagement at the Center of Excellence on Health Disparities Research. “So it’s something that’s been top of mind for a long time. When we had this opportunity to work with Rodney, it seemed like everything aligned with what we’ve been doing for a number of years.”

Adams and Hooker began visiting stores in southwest Atlanta last fall, observing shopping patterns, talking to customers and sometimes to store owners to find out if they might be a good fit for the program. Who’s going in and out of the store? At what time of day? Is there a change in the afternoon when teenagers are coming home from school? Are people driving to the store? What are they buying? Do they chat with the store owner?

That last question is important, Adams says, because store owners can play very different roles in their respective communities. In Philadelphia, some residents saw store owners as an asset to their neighborhood, recalling times when an owner let them buy food on credit when they didn’t have enough cash. Other residents felt like some store owners were coming into their communities “to make a buck.” The Philadelphia program had more funding for financial incentives for those store owners—free coolers for perishables, signage and marketing materials, subsidized prices for new produce items.

“We just have our persuasive charm,” Adams said. “With some of the store owners, you’ll be able to persuade them with the data, talking about health disparities and supporting the community’s overall health. For others, it may be a harder sell. It depends on their outlook and why they’re in the community.”

The goal is to enroll seven stores each year over three years, for a total of 21 stores across five neighborhood planning units. To do that, they’ll have to convince store owners that if they begin stocking fruits and vegetables, customers will actually buy that produce.

“It’s one thing to say, ‘Buy kale,’ but what do you do with kale?” said Adams, pointing out that broader trends show people cook less at home now than in past decades.

“It’s sort of getting at the question of, If you build it, will they come?” Lyn said. “If you change the environment, will people just eat healthier?”

Can corner stores stay competitive?

There’s no question his team needs to think more broadly about how to change behaviors, Lyn said, but they have a plan.

“We’re sharing with them the statistics about chronic disease in their community, that their community members have said they would like this, and then working with them to identify options that have a good chance of being profitable,” he said.

The team will ask stores to carry five or six fruits and vegetables, maybe a couple low-sodium canned foods and more water. In the next few months, Adams and Hooker will create recipe cards and host cooking demonstrations at stores, and possibly nutritional classes, too. They’ll develop messaging around new products and provide signage to guide customers toward healthier options.

Margaret Hooker, community services specialist at the Center of Excellence on Health Disparities Research

“I think there are a lot of ways we can effect change, certainly in terms of shelving,” Adams said. “I’ve gone into a few stores and seen a basket of kiwis or onions on the floor, out of the way. Just like big box stores, shelving and the positioning of food and produce is very important.”

Drawing attention to healthy options with bright, eye-catching signage gives store owners and customers another opportunity to interact as well, Hooker said.

“We can begin educating people about reading labels, understanding the importance of minimizing sodium and saturated fats,” she said.

Lyn wants to keep it simple, highlighting two or three key messages.

“For me, reducing sugar-sweetened beverages is critically important, and trying to increase fiber, fruits and vegetables,” he said. “If you asked me a third, I would say increased consumption of water. If you give me just one of those, I would tell you I think we’re going to see changes in health outcomes. If you give me two, I’d get really excited.”

Without the funding to subsidize prices on fruits and vegetables, though, it’s challenging for corner stores to stay competitive. Healthy food is more expensive in poor neighborhoods. An apple that costs 59 cents at Kroger can go up to $2 or more at a corner store, fueling the perception that eating healthy is for the wealthy.

“Because these stores are so small, the amount of any item they’re going to carry won’t offer them the leverage to get any special discounts through wholesalers or suppliers,” Hooker said. “A lot of them drive to the state farmers market or Costco. So we’re looking at ways to have them pool their orders that would offer them the maximum discount, incentivizing them that way. We want to make it as convenient as possible, as well as economically feasible.”

As of last month, four stores had enrolled in the program and are already carrying healthier options such as whole fruit, fresh nuts and 100-percent juice.

‘This is a start, not an end’

Lyn is the first to say the initiative won’t revolutionize food access for these communities.

“It’s a strategy to engage community members to start to have more conversation about this topic, to look at broader strategies,” Lyn said. “My hope is that owners will decide, ‘You know what, I want to do more.’ And that we’d be able to leverage additional resources, whether through grants or loans, to expand their stores or shelving or refrigeration so they can offer more healthy products.”

As the program begins working with its first round of stores, he’s already busy working on another proposal with a community-based nutrition component.

“That’s what you’re looking at in front of me,” he said, gesturing to the paperwork strewn across his desk. “I’m thinking about how to scale up what we’re doing and have a greater impact, because we’re not going to solve the problem just by putting products in corner stores alone. This is a start, not an end.”

For now, Harris still avoids the corner stores in his neighborhood. Proeller, the Capitol View Manor neighborhood association president, only goes to convenience stores to buy snacks, picking up a bottle of water and a granola bar inside a Chevron station or a nearby mom-and-pop store known around the neighborhood as Solomon’s. Surrounded by a puzzlingly outsized parking lot, Solomon’s is a two-aisle shop on Metropolitan Parkway, a few blocks south of the Capitol View Manor–Pittsburgh border. Along with the usual rows of chips, lottery tickets and 69-cent cigarillos at the register, a small basket of bananas now sits on the counter.