Many people continue to wonder what happened to the Mobile Market and why we no longer run that project. So we want to clarify what’s going on and what we’re up to….

During its four years of operation the Mobile Market was tremendously successful as an outreach and education program, reaching thousands of people and building a membership of over 400 local residents. The Mobile Market also provided People’s Grocery with first-hand experience in marketing healthy foods in the West Oakland community. While the Mobile Market became the flagship project of People’s Grocery and brought our organization local and national attention, the project was meant to be a stepping stone towards a larger vision of opening a cooperative grocery store in West Oakland. A 2006 survey of our Mobile Market customers revealed that our members greatly wanted us to open a grocery store in the community. Responding to this mandate from our constituency we began to pursue our original vision of a full-service grocery store. However, as a small organization with limited capacity we could not simultaneously develop a grocery story and continue to run the Mobile Market. So we put the Mobile Market on hiatus in order to purse a greater opportunity.

We are now fully engaged in creating a cooperative grocery store called People’s Grocery Market (PGM) to serve West Oakland’s unique ethnic and demographic mix. PGM will build on the experience and customer loyalty generated through many years of our work to redesign food retail as a health service and education model that provides an inspiring shopping experience in a community-oriented and culturally-diverse environment that connects food to health, community and culture. PGM will offer accessibly priced healthy and fresh food products, with an emphasis on local and ethnic foods, as well as health education programs, knowledgeable customer service and community events that bring people together and promote local culture and lifestyles. We are making progress in developing this store for the people. Please keep an eye out for new developments. You are all invited to our grand opening, scheduled for the Fall of 2008

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 7:13 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.