Study in contrasts: A trendy cafe in Church Hill, left, and a corner store in North Church Hill (Photos by Kate Kimmel and Mary Margaret Clouse)
The Market at 25th brought nutritional grocery shopping back to Church Hill after the neighborhood’s lack of options left it a certified food desert for over 20 years. After surviving a pandemic and a river of red ink, the Market has earned the most important thing of all—the trust of the community.
By Mary Margaret Clouse and Kate Kimmel
A walk along 25th Street in Richmond, moving north, takes you from the tree-lined streets of Church Hill, named for its abundance of quaint, historic churches, to one of Richmond’s poorest neighborhoods.
Approaching North Church Hill, yoga studios and cafes give way to boarded-up buildings tagged with graffiti. Houses go from manicured to unkempt, from loved to abandoned. In less than half a mile, life expectancy drops from 74 to 67 years, 10 less than the national average. Sixty-seven percent of the population is obese. Healthy food choices are so scarce here that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has classified the area as a “food desert” for years.
But then a man named Steve Markel asked a very simple question: “What can I do to help?”
Markel, a philanthropist from Richmond, was familiar with the city’s history of neglecting places like North Church Hill, essentially “redlining” Black neighborhoods out of existence, beyond the reach of city services and any hope of prosperity. The lack of economic opportunity kept grocery stores away from places like this. To feed their families, people were forced to take a bus to a store miles away or turn to a local convenience store.
These corner stores, with windows covered by boards or bars, don’t sell what you would see in a healthy shopper’s grocery basket. Options are limited to what a small space can hold, most food options are highly-processed, and the products are sold at higher, convenience-store prices.
Determined to change this, Markel began by speaking to residents wherever he could find them. Neighborhood churches, community gatherings, their own front porches. There was one desire he heard again and again: “a full-service grocery store with seafood, hot deli and produce.”
So, in 2019, after two decades on the USDA’s “food desert” list, Church Hill became the site of a new development: The Market at 25th.
The Market is figuratively and literally lined by Church Hill’s history. The aisles are named after neighborhood churches, the sections are named for the area’s public schools and the walls are lined with archival photos featuring the neighborhood’s past and current residents. A timeline of Church Hill’s history composed by Richmond-based historian Elvatrice Parker Belsches spans across the store’s leftmost wall.
Above the Armstrong Deli, a large black and white photograph depicts the 1961 Armstrong High School cheerleaders. The first week that the store was open, Jae Scott, the store’s chief operating officer, saw a woman looking up at the picture and crying. She told Scott that her grandmother was one of the students pictured.
The woman’s emotional reaction was a sign that the effort to weave the threads of Church Hill through the store’s foundation was the right idea. But connecting with residents was harder.
When the market first opened, many customers native to Church Hill complained of feeling that the store wasn’t for them. Richmond’s East End has witnessed a gradual transformation led by housing renovations, expensive coffee shops, and demographic shifts over the past decade, and many saw the Market as yet another symbol of gentrification.
“The message we tried to send to customers who walked in here was, ‘You deserve something good,’” Derek Houston, the market’s business analyst, said.
But in trying to send the message that people deserved something good, people received the message that the store was too good for them.
As an independent grocery store, the Market was unable to offer the competitive prices found in Walmarts and Krogers. Those who visited the store would return to their families and neighbors and share that the prices were too high.
“In all the money we spent on marketing, the most effective message ended up being word of mouth,” Scott said.
As a result, the Market struggled to even come close to turning a profit throughout its first year. To address this, store leadership returned to the front porches and community centers where they had initially heard feedback. The Market team made changes to prices and found better deals. They sought to reverse initial bad impressions by getting customers to return for another look.
When larger stores’ inventory was drained by pandemic supply issues, customers did just that.
“Every time somebody came in here, because we’re independent, we had stuff on the shelves that the big guys had run out of,” Scott said. “Especially our meat department. We had beef and chicken when no one else did, so people would go out and say ‘go to the market, they have meat nobody else has.’”
As more and more customers returned to the Market, they discovered a program that provides customers using SNAP/EBT cards 50% off both fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables. Besides farmers markets, the Market at 25th is the only grocery store in Richmond that offers the deal, which is made possible through Virginia’s Fresh Match program.
The pandemic, in several other ways, gave the Market a second chance to prove itself as a genuine effort to aid Church Hill’s residents. The Market partnered with Richmond Public Schools to deliver food to students that relied on school-provided meals. The Market prepared 300 bags a week that volunteers would deliver to the families and students in need.
Such programs have built a bridge to the community the Market at 25th was meant to serve. The Market has yet to turn a profit, Houston says, but the business measures success in other ways.
“The currency we needed to accumulate to make the store successful was actually trust.”
You can listen to a podcast with the reporters here on Soundcloud.