People’s Grocery Market will be deeply committed to being an inclusive store that can serve all income segments. One way we plan to ensure that healthy foods are accessible to low-income shoppers is to offer ways of using food stamps that significantly benefit low-income families. One example of this is that we plan to offer double-value on food stamp purchases of fruits and vegetables. In other words, shoppers who use food stamps will receive $2 worth of produce for every food stamp dollar they spend. Another offer will be that all customers who make purchases with food stamps will receive a 10% discount. Additionally, we will promote and market our food stamp specials equally to any of our other promotion in order to ensure that food stamps become a core aspect of our business and the way we serve our community. Our hope is that these efforts will enable and provide incentives for low-income shoppers to buy and eat more fresh foods.

People’s Grocery’s plan to focus on food stamps is not just because of the obvious fact that it’s good for the health and well-being of low-income families. Focusing on food stamps is also good for business. The food stamp program is the largest food and nutrition assistance program in the country, serving close to 24 million people nationwide each month. In California nearly 2 million people use food stamps each month, accounting for nearly $2.5 billion dollars in California’s economy - a sizeable sum of dollars that goes mostly to small food retailers. These dollars increase the spending power of low-income people while also strengthening the “multiplier effect” – every food stamp dollar spent at a local store creates $1.84 in local economic activity.

For small businesses catering to low-income communities, food stamps offer a major opportunity to boost the bottom line. Even more opportunity for food retailers is likely to come through new state and federal legislation seeking to solve some of the problems in the food stamp program such as underutilization of food stamps and low consumption of fruits and vegetables. Legislation such as reforms to the 2007 Farm Bill and the California Assembly Bill 2384, known as the “Healthy Purchase Pilot Program”, will strengthen the spending power of low-income families and present significant opportunities for food retail in low-income communities. Many food retailers tend to downplay food stamps and don’t invest a great deal of energy in promoting food stamp use or marketing to shoppers enrolled in food stamps. This strikes us at People’s Grocery as a missed opportunity for both the retailer and the low-income customer. People’s Grocery Market will seek to bring innovation to the use of food stamps as a core aspect of our business to both boost our sales and bridge the gap in access to healthy foods.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 6:26 pm and is filed under People's Grocery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.