Fixing A Food Desert Isn’t As Easy As Putting A Grocery Store On Wheels

For many Native American communities, access to a full-service grocery store can be extremely limited, causing many residents to make less healthy food choices and contributing to diet-related health issues. As part of an effort to fix that for a half-dozen low-income communities between Santa Fe and Albuquerque in New Mexico, a 50-foot, full-service grocery store-on-wheels began pulling up twice a week to a number of plazas in the area beginning in 2011, offering better food options to area residents. Without it, residents were forced to drive long distances to buy fresh groceries. That was until early this year, when the “MoGro,” as the vehicle was called, was sold. The MoGro had grown a small local following and was lauded in the media as an “innovative,” promising solution for food deserts. But the operation, co-created by Sysco chairman Rick Schneiders and his wife Beth, simply was not sustainable. “It was an incredible piece of equipment that was incredibly expensive to run,” MoGro project director Rebecca Baran-Rees explained to The Huffington Post. So the Santa Fe Community Foundation, the non-profit behind MoGro, started over and created a new model. That model, called the Food Club, debuted this spring when MoGro partnered with Albuquerque-based Skarsgard Farms to offer reduced-price deliveries of organic produce and groceries that can be ordered either online or in person at one of six community center partner sites, which also ...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news